Product catalogue
The secret hidden in dust: Uncovering the potential to use metabarcoding of dust for provenance determination, and the capacity to utilise existing soil reference databases
<div>The ubiquitous nature of dust, along with localised chemical and biological signatures, makes it an ideal medium for provenance determination in a forensic context. Metabarcoding of dust can yield biological communities unique to the site of interest, similarly, geochemical and mineralogical analyses can uncover elements and minerals within dust than can be matched to a geographic location. Combining these analyses presents multiple lines of evidence as to the origin of collected dust samples. In this work, we investigated whether the time an item spent at a site collecting dust influenced the ability to assign provenance. We then integrated dust metabarcoding of bacterial and fungal communities into a framework amenable to forensic casework, (i.e., using calibrated log-likelihood ratios to predict the origin of dust samples) and assessed whether current soil metabarcoding databases could be utilised to predict dust origin. Furthermore, we tested whether both metabarcoding and geochemical/mineralogical analyses could be conducted on a single sample for situations where sampling is limited. We found both analyses could generate results capable of separating sites from a single swabbed sample and that the duration of time to accumulate dust did not impact site separation. We did find significant variation within sites at different sampling time periods, showing that bacterial and fungal community profiles vary over time and space – but not to the extent that they are non-discriminatory. We successfully modelled soil and dust samples for both bacterial and fungal diversity, developing calibrated log-likelihood ratio plots and used these to predict provenance for dust samples. We found that the temporal variation in community composition influenced our ability to predict dust provenance and recommend reference samples be collected as close to the sampling time as possible. Thus, our framework showed soil metabarcoding databases are capable of being used to predict dust provenance but the temporal variation in metabarcoded communities will need to be addressed to improve provenance estimates. </div>
<b>Citation:</b>
Nicole R. Foster, Duncan Taylor, Jurian Hoogewerff, Michael G. Aberle, Patrice de Caritat, Paul Roffey, Robert Edwards, Arif Malik, Michelle Waycott and Jennifer M. Young, The secret hidden in dust: Uncovering the potential to use biological and chemical properties of the airborne soil fraction to assign provenance and integrating this into forensic casework, <i>Forensic Science International: Genetics,</i> (2023)
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2022-09-22T16:00:00
- Date (Publication)
- 2023-08-30T21:44:00
- Citation identifier
- Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/147253
- Cited responsible party
-
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Author Foster, N.R.
External Contact Author Taylor, D.
External Contact Author Hoogewerff, J.
External Contact Author Aberle, M.G.
External Contact Author de Caritat, P.
Internal Contact Author Roffey, P.
External Contact Author Edwards, R.
External Contact Author Malik, A.
External Contact Author Waycott, M.
External Contact Author Young, J.
External Contact Publisher Elsevier B.V.
External Contact
- Name
-
Forensic Science International: Genetics
- Purpose
-
Publication in scientific journal (Forensic Science International-Genetics)
- Status
- Completed
- Point of contact
-
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Resource provider Minerals, Energy and Groundwater Division
External Contact Point of contact Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Point of contact Main, P.
MEG Internal Contact
- Spatial representation type
- Topic category
-
- Geoscientific information
Extent
))
- Maintenance and update frequency
- As needed
Resource format
- Title
-
Product data repository: Various Formats
- Website
-
Data Store directory containing the digital product files
Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes
- Keywords
-
-
soil
-
- Keywords
-
-
dust
-
- Keywords
-
-
forensic
-
- Keywords
-
-
provenance
-
- Keywords
-
-
intelligence
-
- theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
-
-
Soil sciences not elsewhere classified
-
Inorganic geochemistry
-
Mineralogy and crystallography
-
Environmental geography
-
- Keywords
-
-
Published_External
-
Resource constraints
- Title
-
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
- Alternate title
-
CC-BY
- Edition
-
4.0
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- License
- Other constraints
-
(c) 2023 The Author(s)
Resource constraints
- Title
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Edition date
- 2018-11-01T00:00:00
- Classification
- Unclassified
- Classification system
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
Associated resource
- Association Type
- Was informed by
- Title
-
Forensic soil provenancing in an urban/suburban setting: a sequential multivariate approach
- Citation identifier
- 144564
- Citation identifier
- 77ec218b-b525-4d73-a5a4-58ef070a653b
Associated resource
- Association Type
- Was informed by
- Title
-
Forensic soil provenancing in an urban/suburban setting: a simultaneous multivariate approach
- Citation identifier
- 145461
- Citation identifier
- 6d6d100c-6b53-4b78-98e1-56b36b74b4cd
Associated resource
- Association Type
- Had derivation
- Title
-
The utility of dust as a forensic provenancing material. Exploring collection methods and detection limits for environmental DNA, elemental and mineralogical analyses of dust samples
- Citation identifier
- 147184
- Citation identifier
- 6de1e7af-f0a4-4682-9baa-1853282a406c
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Distribution Information
- Distributor contact
-
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Distributor Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice facsimile
- OnLine resource
-
Link to Journal
Link to Journal
- Distribution format
-
Resource lineage
- Statement
-
<div>eCat 147184</div>
Metadata constraints
- Title
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Edition date
- 2018-11-01T00:00:00
- Classification
- Unclassified
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
-
urn:uuid/bf38894a-5e27-4003-b1a5-b2a52609f907
- Title
-
GeoNetwork UUID
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
- Contact
-
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Point of contact Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Point of contact Main, P.
MEG Internal Contact
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Document
- Name
-
Journal Article / Conference Paper
Alternative metadata reference
- Title
-
Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with
uuid
- Citation identifier
- eCatId/147253
- Date info (Creation)
- 2022-11-07T03:20:14
- Date info (Revision)
- 2022-11-07T03:20:14
Metadata standard
- Title
-
AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014
Metadata standard
- Title
-
ISO 19115-1:2014
Metadata standard
- Title
-
ISO 19115-3
- Title
-
Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014
- Edition
-
Version 2.0, September 2018
- Citation identifier
- https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551