In recent years, Salvia divinorum has become a major focus by state legislatures throughout the United States looking to prohibit the sale of the psychoactive plant. After researching testing procedures presented in the literature and those employed by crime laboratories throughout the country, it was decided that thin layer chromatography (TLC) and gas chromatography ⁄mass spectrometry (GC ⁄MS...

Carbon disulfide is the solvent of choice for eluting adsorption packages prior to analysis by GC/FID. In laboratories which utilize mass selective detectors instead of flame ionization detectors, diethyl ether, a much friendlier solvent, can be used in place of the CS2. No loss of sensitivity occurs, and there is a salutary impact on bench workers' health as well as on the aroma of the fire de...

Correlation of the Priestley-Taylor coefficient value, α, with air humidity and wind speed for obtaining evapotranspiration (ET) values similar to those by the Penman-Monteith equation maybe justified from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint in cases when wind measurements are lacking. However, by doing so, a conflict of scale arises, which leaves ample room for incorrect generalization about the ...

The standard method to purify sperm DNA from vaginal swabs taken from rape victims is to selectively digest the victim’s epithelial cells to solubilize the victim’s DNA, and then separate the soluble DNA from the intact sperm by centrifugation. A different approach to removing the soluble victim’s DNA is to selectively degrade it using a nuclease, DNase I. DNase I reduces the amount of soluble ...

In parentage testing when one parent is excluded, the distribution of the number of loci showing exclusion due to mutations of the transmitting alleles is derived, and it is contrasted with the expected distribution when the exclusion is caused by nonpaternity. This theory is applied to allele frequency data on short tandem repeat loci scored by PCR analysis, and VNTR data scored by Southern bl...

Estimation of age of skeletal remains is one of the most complex questions for anthropologists. The most common macroscopic methods are based on dental wear and histological evaluation of bone remodeling. These methods are often qualitative, require great technical expertise, and have proved inexact in the estimation of ages over 50 years. Certain dental methods investigate the apposition of se...

REFERENCE: LaFountain M, Schwartz M, Cormier J, Buel E. Forensic samples offer a challenge to nearly any analytical Validation of capillary electrophoresis for analysis of the X-Y method. Sample age or origin may be undetermined and available homologous amelogenin gene. J Forensic Sci 1998;43(6): sample volume small. Material submitted for testing may be depos1188–1194. ited on any imaginable s...

REFERENCE: Negrusz A, Perry JL, Moore CM. Detection of dollar bills that line their pockets. Considering all this information, cocaine on various denominations of United States currency. J can casual contact with money contaminated with cocaine result Forensic Sci 1998;43(3)626–629. in positive urinalysis? In one study (2), the reported concentration of benzoylecgonine in urine following casual...

Introduction Conclusions References

The forensic community has been applying techniques of molecABSTRACT: Studies were performed as recommended by the ular biology to the analysis of DNA extracted from casework samTechnical Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (TWGDAM) ples since the mid 1980’s. Initially, restriction fragment length committee to validate the AmpFISTR Blue PCR Amplification Kit polymorphism (RFLP) analysis (1–3)...