Your hands leave fingerprints and your tissues can be genetically fingerprinted. Illegal drugs can also provide useful fingerprints, provided you know how to read them.
Chemical fingerprinting provided the engaging subject matter for a presentation that claimed the top prize at the third annual Science for All Postgraduate Student Presentation Competition at University College Cork.
Third-year PhD student researcher Dawn Griffin in UCC's department of chemistry and the analytical and biological chemistry research facility claimed the prize with a talk entitled, The Chemical Fingerprinting of 'Super Ecstasy'.
It described how impurities left behind during the manufacture of this drug can provide clues about where it was made.
"Super ecstasy is a dangerous drug of abuse," explains Griffin who is working towards a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry. "It is an illegal schedule 1 drug and a potent hallucinogen and psycho-active drug," she says. "What I hope to do is to assess the toxicity of any impurities in the drug. We want to establish if these impurities have toxic effects or not."
Super ecstasy is a "designer drug" which came to prominence in 2004 when 82,000 tablets were seized. Ordinary ecstasy is a stimulant but super ecstasy is strongly hallucinogenic, explains Griffin, who works under supervisor, Dr J J Keating.
While studying toxicity is her ultimate goal, the initial challenge is to find and identify the impurities mixed with the drug after manufacture, says Griffin.
These impurities or "chemical fingerprints" are of particular interest to the forensic chemist as they can be used to determine how a drug was manufactured, she says. "Impurity profiling" is used to generate this chemical fingerprint, providing useful information to drug enforcement agencies. "We use flash chromatography to isolate the impurities," explains Griffin. "Then we study them spectroscopically."
The impurities that end up in a drug tell a chemist something about how the drug was made. Once Griffin has these fully identified she wants to go on to test their toxicity, using cultured human cell lines.
The Science for All competition is open to senior postgraduate students in the College of Science, Engineering and Food Science. The competition is jointly organised by the College of Science, Engineering and Food Science and the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, UCC.
The goal is to encourage young scientists to communicate the results of their research to the public using easily understood language free of jargon. Sponsors for the event include Discover Science and Engineering, the Tyndall National Institute, and Snap Printing.