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Book Details
Author(s)Mottola, Patricia J
ISBN / ASIN1243468319
ISBN-139781243468314
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Soil can be of broad evidentiary value as it is commonly found in many locations that may link a victim or suspect to the scene of a crime. Soil samples from a shoe, tire, clothing, or any other material may be collected by the crime scene investigator and taken back to the laboratory for further analysis. While traditional methods of soil analysis can differentiate soils, they lack the ability to positively link the questioned soil to the area from which it originated. Recent research has examined microbial communities as a tool for differentiating soil from diverse locations in a forensic setting. There are an infinite number of microorganisms, particularly bacteria, present in soil. These differ throughout geographical regions and have the potential to establish the site from which a soil sample originated. This study takes advantage of rhizobia, soil bacteria that fix nitrogen after becoming established inside root nodules of legumes. Rhizobia require a plant host, so their presence is highly variable based on plant species in an area. Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (T-RFLP) was studied as a means of establishing temporal variability, local heterogeneity, and whether the five habitats being compared could be differentiated from each other. Using multidimensional scaling (MDS), when all five habitats were compared, only two could frequently be distinguished from others. However, by comparing only two habitats concurrently, each habitat but the agricultural field could be separated.
