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  


Authors / CoAuthors

Foster, N.R. | Taylor, D. | Hoogewerff, J. | Aberle, M.G. | de Caritat, P. | Roffey, P. | Edwards, R. | Malik, A. | Waycott, M. | Young, J.

Abstract

<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.&nbsp;</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) doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsigen.2023.102931

Product Type

document

eCat Id

147253

Contact for the resource

  Resource provider

 

  Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)  
Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
Canberra
ACT
2601
Australia

  Point of contact

 
Contact instructions
MEG

Keywords

  • soil
  • dust
  • forensic
  • provenance
  • intelligence
theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
  • Soil sciences not elsewhere classifiedInorganic geochemistryMineralogy and crystallographyEnvironmental geography
  • Published_External

Publication Date

2023-08-30T21:44:00

Creation Date

2022-09-22T16:00:00

Security Constraints

Australian Government Security Classification System    

Classification - unclassified

Legal Constraints

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence    

Access - license

Use - license

Status

completed

Purpose

Publication in scientific journal (Forensic Science International-Genetics)

Maintenance Information

asNeeded

Topic Category

geoscientificInformation

Series Information

Forensic Science International: Genetics

Lineage

<div>eCat 147184</div>

Parent Information

Extents

[-39.00, -26.00, 129.00, 141.00]

Reference System

Spatial Resolution

Service Information

Associations

Association Type - wasInformedBy

Forensic soil provenancing in an urban/suburban setting: a sequential multivariate approach    

eCat Identifier - 144564,

UUID - 77ec218b-b525-4d73-a5a4-58ef070a653b

Association Type - wasInformedBy

Forensic soil provenancing in an urban/suburban setting: a simultaneous multivariate approach    

eCat Identifier - 145461,

UUID - 6d6d100c-6b53-4b78-98e1-56b36b74b4cd

Association Type - hadDerivation

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    

eCat Identifier - 147184,

UUID - 6de1e7af-f0a4-4682-9baa-1853282a406c

Downloads and Links

Link to Journal  

Source Information