Implen GmbH announces that scientists at the National Centre for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida have developed a novel blood analysis technique using the NanoPhotometer® which facilitates the direct analysis of blood stains as part of a criminal investigation.

So far, there is no generally accepted procedure available that enables forensic scientists to determine the age of blood stains at a crime scene. Present methods are either limited in their predictive power or their analytical sensitivity.

However the University of Central Florida, through grants from the US National Institute of Justice and the Forensic Technologies Centre of Excellence (FTCoE), Florida, USA, have identified a novel hypsochromic shift of the Soret band of haemoglobin that allows for bloodstains to be distinguished by age in terms of minutes, hours, days, weeks or months. To be fully effective the analysis should be performed at the actual crime scene and so the NanoPhotometer® from Implen GmbH, Germany, was selected for this purpose. Its portability, its low volume capability and its overall analytical performance were main arguments for the positive evaluation. The Implen NanoPhotometer® is also ideally suited for the quantification of DNA following extraction, enzymatic activity or protein quantification.