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DNA from the air

12.09.2021

Forensic scientists actively use DNA analysis: if traces of someone's DNA remain on some surface, it means that a person touched this surface - for example, he could lean on a table, or run his hand along the wall. Or he could not lean and not hold: Flinders University employees found out that it is not necessary to touch with your hand to leave a DNA trace - your DNA can fly to an object through the air.

For the experiment, special plates for collecting DNA were placed around several work tables. The dice stood at a distance of half a meter to five meters, and they stood like that from one day to one and a half months. Nobody was supposed to touch them. And it turned out that despite the fact that no one touched the dies, the DNA of the person who worked next to them settled on them.

It is easy to guess that the amount of DNA was the greater, the longer it was collected. With the distance, everything was not so obvious: most of the DNA was on those plates that stood at a distance of two meters. If there were more than four meters between the die and the desktop, then there was almost no DNA in it. It is clear that DNA will not reach a long distance. But the fact that it was less at half a meter than at two meters can perhaps be explained by the fact that a short distance of DNA simply flies: air movements produced by a person drive it away further.

DNA is a fairly stable molecule. A dead cell, when destroyed, leaves DNA in its place, which will also be partially destroyed, but still not completely - as we know, DNA that has remained in the soil since the time of the Neanderthals is now being successfully read. We are constantly shedding a certain amount of DNA from dead skin cells, exhaling it along with water vapor from the lungs, etc., so it is not surprising that even without touching we are able to leave some kind of DNA trace. And criminologists probably need to take this into account: on the one hand, such DNA can help understand the testimony and facilitate the search for a criminal.

On the other hand, it can also become garbage, which does not allow you to see the true picture of what happened. And this is not the first study that questions the validity of DNA as a witness: we already wrote once that due to the strength and stability of DNA, traces of the DNA of a person who never touched it can remain on a crime weapon.

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Copper for hospital 09.11.2008

A curious experiment has been going on in one of the hospitals in Birmingham (Great Britain) for almost a year. They took two intensive care units and in one replaced with copper, brass or bronze all the steel, aluminum and plastic parts that doctors, nurses and patients touch: door and window handles, water taps, switches, buttons and so on. In another similar department, everything was left as it was and microflora samples are regularly taken from all these details.

The results of the experience have not yet been summed up, but preliminary studies conducted at the University of Southampton show that copper and its alloys have bactericidal properties. Copper prevents bacteria from breathing and damages their DNA, although the mechanism of this action is not yet clear. In any case, 10 million Staphylococcus aureus placed on a square centimeter of a copper plate (which is 10 thousand times more than the number of these microbes on the same area of a door handle in a hospital) die in an hour and a half.

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