A single strand of hair can be used to solve the toughest crimes.

By heating a follicle in solution, researchers are able extract protein that is unique to that person – allowing them to identify a law-breaking individual.

Officials on the scene only need to locate a hair strand as shorts as one centimeter for the test to be successful, which is said to be eight times more sensitive than the leading protein analysis techniques.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) set out to make hair comparisons a more useful technique for investigating crimes, as DNA evidence degrades much faster.

Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids, which are strung together in a particular sequence, like beads on a string.

In hair, those sequences vary slightly from person to person, and because they are coded in our genes, they are permanent features of our identity.

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A single strand of hair can be used to solve the toughest crimes. By heating a follicle in solution, researchers are able extract protein that is unique to that person – allowing them to identify a law-breaking individual

However, leading hair analysis techniques consist of several steps that end up destroying the protein, as reported by Science Magazine.

The previous method required multiple soakings, grindings and chemical treatments of the hair in order to extra proteins.

And because some protein was lost with each step, a large amount of hair was needed to recover enough for the analysis.

The team at NIST found that using just one of the steps, heating the hair in a solution with detergent, and were able to extract the necessary molecule without damaging evidence.

Once in solution, the protein molecules can be investigated and compared, yielding objective, quantitative results.

After analyzing what was extracted, researchers found they had recovered even more proteins than compared to other extraction techniques.

Officials on the scene only need to locate a hair strand as shorts as one centimeter for the test to be successful, which is said to be eight times more sensitive than the leading protein analysis techniques

Genetically variant peptides (GVPs) were also discovered, which are unique to each person.

NIST health specialist and study author Zheng Zhang said: 'The more GVPs you have, the more people you can distinguish from each other.'

'It's like having additional genetic alleles in a DNA profile.'

Zhang noted that the term 'identify' should also be taken with a grain of salt: Protein sequences are highly individual, but there's still a chance—one in 1 million or even one in 10 million—that two people share the same one.

The team is also working with geneticists at NIST to map keratin variations to the genetic sequences that give rise to them.

That will allow comparisons not only of one hair to another, but of a hair to a DNA sample.

In other words, if a hair is found at one crime scene and a bloodstain is found at another, investigators might be able to assess whether they came from the same individual.