Over 700 fingerprints, collected and analysed by the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, to answer a question every forensic lab dealing with touch evidence eventually faces: which extraction method actually gets usable DNA off a fingerprint reliably.

The team compared a commercially available enzymatic extraction kit, branded as Zygem at the time, against two extraction protocols built in-house specifically for this difficult sample type: a simple one-tube method, and a more involved high-sensitivity protocol with extra concentration and purification steps.

The purpose-built high-sensitivity protocol and the commercially available enzymatic kit produced significantly better DNA yields than the simple one-tube method. The enzymatic kit held its own against a protocol designed and refined specifically for fingerprint work by a forensic laboratory with deep institutional experience in this sample type.

Fingerprints are an unforgiving sample: low quantity, inconsistent quality, and no second chance once the print is lifted. Holding up against a dedicated in-house method, in a study run independently by a public forensic laboratory, is a meaningfully different bar than performing well in a vendor's own validation data.

A commercial kit matched a protocol an entire forensic laboratory built and refined specifically to solve this problem. That is not a marginal result. If your lab is still running a multi-step in-house fingerprint protocol, it may be worth asking what forensicGEM would save you