From correspondents in Washington, United States, 03:31 PM IST

In the battle against crime, forensic experts have enlisted a tool that would lift missing fingerprints from the human skin and help nab the killer!

The portable system, being developed by ChemImage and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), would enable investigators at crime scenes to detect latent prints on the human skin, ScienceDaily reported.

The system relies on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based agents to visualise latent prints. A team led by Linda Lewis of ORNL is working to identify fingerprint components that are SERS active.

The ORNL team has identified a novel silver coated nanowire as the SERS agent of choice. This material was developed at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

The ORNL team is now assisting NRL with developing a method for producing highly active silver-coated nanowires to support a method of chemically imaging latent fingerprints.

(Staff Writer, © IANS)