Professor Bruce Fedolli described a targeted microbial assay (HID SkinPlex) that yielded high identification accuracies on pilot skin swabs, reporting hand sample accuracy near 98% and outlining plans to expand to 50 participants to validate and refine markers.

At the NIJ Forensic Science R&D Symposium, David Foran of Michigan State University reported that bacterial profiling of soil can produce usable 'fingerprints' from trace amounts (as little as about 1 milligram), that surface samples are usually most informative, and that wet blood or wet storage can substantially alter results.