The environmental biological signature: NGS profiling for forensic comparison of soils

Abstract The identification of the source of a specific soil sample is a crucial step in forensic investigations. Rapid advances in next generation sequencing (NGS) technology and the strong reduction of the cost of sequencing have recently opened new perspectives. In the present work a metabarcoding approach has been successfully applied to forensic and environmental soil samples, allowing the accurate and sensitive analysis of microflora (mfDNA), plants, metazoa, and protozoa DNA. The identification of the biological component by DNA metabarcoding is a strong element for the discrimination of samples geologically very similar but coming for distinct environments.