Tracking down the culprit with biodiversity

Soil DNA analyzes have been a core competence of our Thünen-Institute of Biodiversity for years. This did not go unnoticed by the criminal police either. At the invitation of the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) Rhineland-Palatinate, Prof. Christoph Tebbe and Dr. Damien Finn conducted a training seminar for experts in forensic biology at the LKA in Mainz.

Subsequently, 10 selected experts from the Federal Criminal Police Office and various LKAs visited our Institute for Biodiversity for a three-day internship and were shown by our team how to extract DNA from soil and analyze the microbiome in order to gain information about the identity of soil samples. Conclusion: crime does not pay - a crumb of the ground can be enough to track down the perpetrator...