Abigail Anugengen
fingerprints
is the mark deposited on a surface by an unknown
individual while fingerprints are the prints collected in a
more controlled manner from known individuals. They
include the whole top joint of the finger and are created
using either ink or digital imaging. Fingermarks have a
key role in identification and crime detection.
Three sweat glands are responsible for the production
of sweat, they include eccrine, apocrine and apoeccrine
glands. These glands spread throughout the whole-body
surface where it freely opens on to the epidermal surface.
The different glands produce sweat with different compositions.
The three glands; sebaceous gland, eccrine and
apocrine sweat glands are major contributors to the extent
of fingermark residue.
A method was developed and validated for the analysis
of cortisol in sweat and fingermarks using High performance
liquid chromatography (HPLC). Agilent Eclipse
Plus C18, 5μm 4.6 x 150mm, a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min,
temperature was ambient, the wavelength was at 254 nm
and an injection volume of 10 μL is described. The effect
of mobile phase composition, injection
volume and the effect of liquid-liquid extraction was
studied. A mobile phase of 10% acetonitrile in deionised
water as solvent A and water as solvent B in a ratio of
40:60 was used and this allowed for a good separation
of cortisol and the internal standard (6α-methylprednisolone)
up to baseline. These results were also achieved by
optimization the HPLC-UV/vis methods. The proposed
method is reproducible, selective and sensitive, but less
sensitive compared to other methods used for the analysis
of cortisol recorded in previous studies. In addition
to that, this method is less time consuming compared to
Gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for the
analysis of cortisol.
The method was applied to human sweat and fingermark
samples from volunteers after exercise to determine the
concentration of cortisol.
The possibility for the analytical procedure developed in
this study to further our understanding of the analysis of
cortisol has been shown.