Simona Francese

And now you transfer it in a rather mesmerizing way.

So it's a beautiful pattern of lines, but it is not just a pattern of lines.

It is a pattern of lines made up of molecules.

What molecules?

Whatever our body produces, metabolizes, and then eliminates through sweat.

Of course, anything that is sitting on your fingertip as you go around in your activities, touching things, right?

So that's really what a fingerprint is.

is a molecular pattern unique to an individual, a molecular pattern of lines.

And what can we do with this?

We've exploited this knowledge, and in some pioneering research, we have developed a mass spectrometry technique called MOLDI that actually measures the weight of the molecules.

And by making these measurements, we are able to know what these molecules are, who these molecules are, but we can also see them.

So if these molecules are distributed homogeneously onto the ridge pattern, by visualizing them, you can visualize a beautiful ridge pattern.

So now you get a molecular image of a fingerprint.

Or we can even resolve overlapping fingerprints because we just interrogated the software and recalled the image of distribution of molecules that are unique to each of those fingerprints.

So, for example, we can eliminate the fingerprint of the victim or we can submit to the database for identification the fingerprint of the perpetrator.

Although this technique has been used already nationally and internationally, it's been endorsed by the UOM office, that's actually not the only thing that we can do with this.

Remember, we are looking at molecules, and molecules are there for a reason.

They tell a story about you.

that tell about your lifestyle.

They might tell about the medications that you're taking.