On Monday's episode of "CSI: Miami," Lt. Horatio Caine might remove his sunglasses long enough to admire a new piece of crime-fighting equipment developed by a professor at Purdue University.

The Desorption Electrospray Ionization, or DESI, is the creation of R. Graham Cooks, Purdue's Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry.

"It's gratifying to have technology we developed featured in such a popular show," Cooks said.

The device reads a fingerprint's chemical signature and can unearth fingerprints buried beneath others or reveal what a person recently handled. It also can create an image of the fingerprint for identity searches.

The analysis of a fingerprint's chemical signature will play an important role in solving a case on Monday night's "CSI: Miami."

While it's important to Cooks to have technology created by him and his team highlight the practical applications that come from such an endeavor, the DESI has a more important application than fingerprinting.

"This method ... has a lot of applications," Cooks said. "It will be in medicine in the future."

Applications include looking at tissue to determine if it is cancerous.

"As far as forensics, this is a single experiment," Cooks said.

The DESI was licensed by Prosolia Inc., which supplied it to "CSI: Miami."

Prosolia was established in 2003 to commercialize technology arising from the laboratory of Cooks and his research team, who have been innovators in the field of Mass Spectrometry for years.

Scientists from Prosolia helped generate data for tonight's episode and advised its writers.

"The CSI series shows science in an exciting and entertaining way, which has great impact in garnering students' interest in these fields," said Pete Kissinger, Prosolia's CEO.

"CSI: Miami" writers Matt Partney and Corey Evett said they are always looking for new and interesting ways to discover and process evidence on the show.

"We were excited about the DESI technology, because it allowed us to get fingerprint evidence -- something we do a lot of on the show -- in a way we'd never done," Partney said.

According to Evett, the fact that the technology was so new helped immensely.

"DESI highlights just how quickly technology changes in the field of crime-scene investigation," he said.

Cooks was surprised how fast the producers of "CSI: Miami" moved on the device, especially since the DESI process was first published in Science magazine in August.

"It didn't take long to incorporate," Cooks said.

The episode features a character named Max Purdue, supposedly a tribute to DESI's creator. Cooks won't be able to watch, not that he would anyway.

"I don't watch TV," he said. "I get enough excitement in the lab."