Forensic Investigations
A relatively recent addition to my research interests has been the application of soil lipid analysis to forensic investigations. Following death, as a body decomposes, a multitude of organic decomposition products will leach into the soil environment. It is almost certain that such a large input of extraneous organic material would have drastically affected other classes of chemicals found within soil. This may be the result of an input of compounds directly from adipocere (e.g. fatty acids) or significant changes may also have been wrought by stimulus of the soil microbiological community, by input of adipocere, resulting in qualitative and quantitative changes to the profile of microbial products produced as the structure of the soil microbiological community is altered. To date there has been no studies of the chemical compounds produced by the microbial biomass in associated soils. It is envisaged that molecular profiling of primary and/or secondary metabolic products may be developed to become a useful and robust means for sourcing organic inputs (e.g. adipocere) to environmental matrices in circumstances where there are no longer any morphological remains of an input and/or more specific molecular biological techniques are rendered unviable.
This is proving to be an interesting area of research and further aspects of this work are currently ongoing.
