Fingerprints Will Now Lighten Up If You Leave Them Behind

If you are a fan of TV shows featuring crime-fighting you know how important fingerprints are in incriminating perpetrators in any scenario. The conventional process of picking up latent fingerprints is either by dusting or vapor. In a new research, a team from Zhejiang University led by Bin Su from Hangzhou, China has taken up the process of fingerprinting to a whole new level by using electrochemiluminescence to light up fingerprints.

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As you might know the process of achieving electrochemiluminescence is to combine compound like ruthenium complex with a partner chemical like tripropylamine and passing electricity through it. When electrons from the electrode pass through this mixture it becomes electronically unstable and emits light in order to return to ground state. Researchers applied this principle by transferring the fingerprint to either a glass plate coated with indium tin oxide or a stainless steel plate and added the above mixture. Places where fat contents of the fingerprint are present stay dark while the other areas light up to provide a negative image of the fingerprint. The photo of this negative can be taken with a CCD camera. In order to get a positive image of the fingerprint they treated it with a reagent that binds the components of the mixture to the print so that only the lines present on the fingerprint light up.

Future applications of this technique involves finding out procedures to detect which substances and drugs a person has ingested or came in contact with. So, watch out.

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