title: Moistened hands do not necessarily allude to high quality fingerprints: the relationship between palmar moisture and fingerprint donorship.
abstract: We explored the quality distribution of ninhydrin-developed prints on A4 bond paper in two groups of individuals, in Israel and in India. While the quality distributions of the developed marks in both countries had some dissimilarities, both groups showed the expected bell-shape distribution, with the majority of the donors belonging to the central zone, defined as "average" or "good." Attempt was made to correlate between a physiological feature, palmar moisture, and the fingerprint donorship. As a rule, high fingermark quality could be associated with sweating hands, but there were individuals with moist palms whose fingermarks had a low score and vice versa. This finding supports the logical but hitherto unproven assumption that besides the amount of palmar sweat, the other physiological factor governing the prints' quality is the total amount of substrate, amino acids in this case, in the latent deposits, which depends on the substrate concentration in the sweat.
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. almog@vms.huji.ac.il
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Almog
authors.forename: Hadar
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sheratzki
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Elad-Levin
authors.forename: Assaf E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Sagiv
authors.forename: Gagan Deep
authors.initials: GD
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.forename: Om Prakash
authors.initials: OP
authors.lastname: Jasuja
mesh_terms: D003878:Dermatoglyphics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007202:Indicators and Reagents; D007557:Israel; D008297:Male; D009555:Ninhydrin; D012879:Skin Physiological Phenomena; D013542:Sweat
chemical_list: D007202:Indicators and Reagents; D009555:Ninhydrin