From drug use to diet: Just a little sweat is enough to learn what chemically happened in a person’s body.
Anyone who touches something leaves traces. Fingerprints have been used to solve crimes since the late 19th century. Using the characteristic pattern of the finger grooves, suspects can be clearly identified. A team led by chemist Christopher Gerner from the University of Vienna has now shown that even the tiny sweat droplets on the underside of the fingertips reveal a lot about a person’s behavior and habits. As the researchers in Nature Communications report, the secretion released at the fingertips consists of 99 percent water. At the same time, it also contains a lot of electrolytes as well as urea, lactate, amino acids, metal ions, various metabolic breakdown products and foreign substances, the composition of which differs depending on the person and situation. In the meantime, they have already been able to detect 250 substances faster and more easily with the new method than with the usual urine or blood analysis, says Gerner.