Research Progress on the Application of Human Body Surface Microbiome to Forensic Individual Identification

Skin and hair are the outermost interfaces between the human body and the external environment with many microorganisms distributed. These body surface microorganisms have individual specificity and spatial temporal stability and can be transferred to the surface of other objects through contact, and can be easily found at the crime scene, which helps to construct the connection between the suspect and the crime scene. When the sample is degraded or the DNA quantity is too low to obtain sufficient human DNA evidence, the highly amplified copies of body surface microbiome analysis can be used as an adjunct to human DNA typing without affecting DNA extraction and typing, and provide useful information for narrowing the range of suspects. This paper reviews the forensic characteristics and analytical methods of body surface microbiome, the research progress on the application of body surface microbiome to forensic individual identification, and puts forward the challenges of applying body surface microbiome to forensic practice.