By Sid Perkins
From Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences
Add flip-open cell phones to the list of crime-scene items that might harbor a suspect’s DNA.
After seeing media coverage of a crime in which a suspect had bled on a cell phone that he later dropped, Meghan J. McFadden, a molecular biologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wondered whether normal phone use would leave detectable traces of DNA. So she and colleague Margaret Wallace of the City University of New York analyzed the flip-open phones of 10 volunteers.