Palynology, one science of plant's pollen and spores, has been proven to be a new frontier discipline. Because of the characteristics of pollen and spores, such as small size, light weight, large amount, and difficult to be found, they can leave physical evidence and provide new clues to solve a case. Therefore palynology has a good prospect for practical application in forensic medicine. The paper intends to analyze the advantage and limitation of palynology in forensic medicine by reviewing its general characteristics, classification, morphology, and disseminating circadian rhythm. We hope to provide some reference to apply palynology in forensic medicine.
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Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2025
The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 5290002, Israel.
In contrast to animal foods, wild plants often require long, multistep processing techniques that involve significant cognitive skills and advanced toolkits to perform. These costs are thought to have hindered how hominins used these foods and delayed their adoption into our diets. Through the analysis of starch grains preserved on basalt anvils and percussors, we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, at least 780,000 y ago.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicron
December 2024
Graduate School of Natural and Applied Science, Biology Department, Bursa Uludağ University, Bursa, Turkey,; Arts and Sciences Faculty, Biology Department, Bursa Uludağ University, Bursa, Turkey. Electronic address:
Pollen grains, in addition to their allergenic properties, play an important role in the temporal and spatial analysis of forensic events and are considered secondary trace evidence. Pollen analysis requires expertise in microscopy techniques and palynology. This study aims to determine the persistence of pollen on common used fabric types and how much of it can be removed through washing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicrosc Res Tech
June 2024
Department of Botany & Microbiology, HNB Garhwal University, Srinagar, Uttarakhand, India.
Apart from its role in plant taxonomy, the understanding of pollen morphology is considered an essential interdisciplinary tool in diverse applied fields, including plant systematics, melissopalynology, aeropalynology, forensic palynology, paleopalynology, and copropalynology. In palynotaxonomy, it is frequently employed to classify and validate natural groups across a range of hierarchical levels, from higher categories down to the infrageneric level. The subfamily Acanthoideae, within the Acanthaceae family, consists of a diverse group of flowering plants that are distributed globally.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Justice
January 2024
Faculty of Biology, iomE, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Hans-Dieter-Hüsch-Weg 15, Mainz, Germany. Electronic address:
Forensic palynology is a tool in criminalistics that uses spores and pollen grains to link a certain geographical location with a crime scene. The comparison of the pollen assemblage of a crime-scene soil and that of footwear of suspects and victims proved to be very useful as judicial evidence in multiple environments with marked seasonality. However, its usefulness in non-seasonal high-altitude soils has not been experimentally evaluated to the same extent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForensic Sci Med Pathol
December 2023
Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, The University of Lahore, Lahore, Pakistan.
This review is engaged in determining the capability of plant pollen as a significant source of evidence for the linkage between suspects and crime location in forensic sciences. Research and review articles were collected from Google Scholar, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Articles were searched using specific keywords such as "Forensic Palynology," "Pollen metabarcoding," "Plant forensics," and "Pollen" AND "criminal investigation.
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