Research and Support Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, Quantico, VA, 22135, United States; Visiting Scientist Program, Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Oak Ridge, TN, 37830, United States.
Forensic Science Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, 94550, United States.
Forensic Sci Int Genet. 2021 Jan;50:102396. doi: 10.1016/j.fsigen.2020.102396. Epub 2020 Sep 30.
Neither microscopical hair comparisons nor mitochondrial DNA sequencing alone, or together, constitutes a basis for personal identification. Due to these limitations, a complementary technique to compare questioned and known hair shafts was investigated. Recently, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Forensic Science Center and other collaborators developed a peptide profiling technique, which can infer non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) preserved in hair shaft proteins as single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs). In this study, peptide profiling was evaluated to determine if it can meet forensic expectations when samples are in limited quantities with the possibility that hair samples collected from different areas of a single donor's scalp (i.e., single source) might not exhibit the same SAP profile. The average dissimilarity, percent differences in SAP profiles within each source, ranged from 0% difference to 29%. This pilot study suggests that more work is needed before peptide profiling of hair can be considered for forensic comparisons.
单凭显微镜下毛发比对或线粒体 DNA 测序，或两者结合，都不能作为个人身份识别的依据。由于这些局限性，研究人员探索了一种补充技术来比较可疑和已知的毛发。最近，劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室法医科学中心的科学家和其他合作者开发了一种肽谱分析技术，可以推断出毛发蛋白中保存的非同义单核苷酸多态性 (SNP) 作为单个氨基酸多态性 (SAP)。在这项研究中，评估了肽谱分析是否可以满足法医的期望，即当样本数量有限且从单个供体头皮的不同区域（即单一来源）收集的毛发样本可能不表现出相同的 SAP 谱时。每个来源内 SAP 图谱的平均差异和差异百分比范围从 0%差异到 29%。这项初步研究表明，在肽谱分析可用于法医比较之前，还需要做更多的工作。
