THE EFFECT OF WATER AND DETERGENT WASHINGS ON FORENSIC DETECTION OF SALIVA STAINS FROM COMMONLY USED NATURAL AND SYNTHETIC CLOTHES

Main Article Content

Fatima Arshad
Ansar Zubair
Asma Irshad
Kashaf Zehra
Amna Irfan

Keywords

Forensic detection, Saliva Stains, Clothes

Abstract

Forensic science plays main role in criminal justice system. Mainly, homicide, sexual assault and burglary, permit the assembly of biological evidence. Blood, semen and saliva commonly obtain from the crime scene. Culprit often tries to remove these biological stains through washing out the crime scene or the items but previously it has demonstrated that DNA can still recover from laundered clothes. The purpose of this study was to observe the effect of water and detergent wash on clothes and to extract, detect and quantify the amount DNA from these clothes. In this study, natural and synthetic clothes gave positive results under various presumptive tests. Both types of clothes gave different ranges of mean diameter after water wash till three washings. Saliva was found retain from laundered natural clothes till ten washings after processing with detergent while the laundered synthetic clothes could not efficiently retain saliva after treatment with detergent. DNA extracted from clothes analyzed under UV spectrophotometer demonstrated that both natural and synthetic clothes could give the good amount of DNA that was enough to generate the DNA profile. Overall terry, cotton, linen, khaddar, denim and spandex clothes showed the efficient results for saliva detection while wool, polyester and nylon exhibited the poor results.

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