Molecular docking study on europium nanoparticles and mussel adhesive protein for effective detection of latent fingerprints.

Reflecting on the difficulty of finding the evidence of latent fingerprints on wet and rough surfaces, scientists need to visualise those fingermarks without any background interference and stable adhesion of visualising material over the fingermark residues. To stabilize the interaction with the fingermarks, the synthesized nanoparticles were conjugated with a highly adhesive biopolymer, Mussel Adhesive Protein (MAP) which can effectively interact with fingerprint deposits. Rare earth metal, europium oxide and nanoparticles were used as a visualisation material to get high contrast and reduced background interference-based fingerprints.