On the Job 

A touch can say so much, and no one knows that better than the scientist who spent the past year pulling DNA from weapons at the BCI lab in Richfield.

Dennis DeLuca, who on July 1 concluded his fellowship at the lab, spent much of his time coming up with a new way to recover “touch” DNA. He will submit his findings for publication in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

A touch leaves cells behind.

“People vary in how many cells they leave,” DeLuca said. “Most people are moderate to low shedders, but 20 to 30 percent are high shedders. If you’re a criminal, you want to be a low shedder.”

The project was particularly concerned with handguns. If a gun is thought to have been used in a crime, or is believed to have been in the hands of a felon, it can be checked for fingerprints and DNA. Checking for DNA on a gun can be tricky because more than one person may have held the weapon, and if those people are related, there might be genetic overlap.

“If I found a better swabbing technique or extraction technique, then you could recover more of the DNA,” he said.

DeLuca, who has a doctorate in molecular/regulatory biology from Cleveland State University, is an associate professor of biological sciences and director of the Forensics Biology Program at Ohio Northern University.

He has experience in forensics, first at the coroner’s office in Wichita, Kansas, and, later, in the trace-evidence lab at the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office in Cleveland, where he performed DNA-validation studies in the late 1990s.

This year in the BCI lab, he worked on several projects – one was to improve the collection of evidence from Duct tape, which is often found at crime scenes.

“Most perps don’t use scissors to cut Duct tape. They grab it and leave fingerprints. Fingerprints have cells.”

He also conducted research on techniques for collecting blood evidence and DNA from knives that have been submerged in water. For the experiments, he cut into pig carcasses and placed the bloody knives in water. He removed the knives from the water at various intervals and collected DNA from the blades in order to study the degradation of the DNA along with recovery.

“We are doing this because in some evidence-collection handbooks for water recoveries, the guidelines are to collect the weapons in the same water,” he said. “If you have a knife involved in a stabbing, you want to get it out and dry it out so you don’t lose the DNA. That’s the reason the CSI guys want this done,” he said. “They want a new policy. … We think this would make more sense, but we have to prove it.”

DeLuca also developed a stain to make it easier to see if hair evidence has a follicular tag at the root. When applied, the dye stains the cells of the follicle a rosy color to indicate that the hair would be a good sample to test for DNA. Using the dye would increase efficiency of choosing hair for DNA profiling.

Now that the fellowship has ended, DeLuca has returned to Ohio Northern.