New Reagents for the Development of Latent Fingerprints

Some of the most affordable and useful reagents for visualization of latent fingerprints on porous surfaces such as paper, wood, and walls are ninhydrin and modified ninhydrins. The paper reviews the development and evaluation of several synthetic approaches that provided 21 new substituted ninhydrins. These reagents were evaluated for fingerprint visualization by forensic experts in the United States, England, Switzerland, Australia, and Israel. The new methodology afforded two complementary reagents which displayed similar fingerprint developing properties. One of the reagents was produced on a large scale by a firm in North Ireland to investigate its potential for commercialization. In addition, structural modifications of ninhydrin-based reagents expanded their solubilities in suitable organic solvents (methylene chloride, toluene, hexanes, etc.). Notes, bibliography, figures, tables