Profiling of RNA Degradation for Estimation of Post Morterm Interval

Fernanda Sampaio-Silva, Teresa Magalhães, Félix Carvalho, Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira and Ricardo Silvestre

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 2, 1-8

Abstract: An estimation of the post mortem interval (PMI) is frequently touted as the Holy Grail of forensic pathology. During the first hours after death, PMI estimation is dependent on the rate of physical observable modifications including algor, rigor and livor mortis. However, these assessment methods are still largely unreliable and inaccurate. Alternatively, RNA has been put forward as a valuable tool in forensic pathology, namely to identify body fluids, estimate the age of biological stains and to study the mechanism of death. Nevertheless, the attempts to find correlation between RNA degradation and PMI have been unsuccessful. The aim of this study was to characterize the RNA degradation in different post mortem tissues in order to develop a mathematical model that can be used as coadjuvant method for a more accurate PMI determination. For this purpose, we performed an eleven-hour kinetic analysis of total extracted RNA from murine's visceral and muscle tissues. The degradation profile of total RNA and the expression levels of several reference genes were analyzed by quantitative real-time PCR. A quantitative analysis of normalized transcript levels on the former tissues allowed the identification of four quadriceps muscle genes (Actb, Gapdh, Ppia and Srp72) that were found to significantly correlate with PMI. These results allowed us to develop a mathematical model with predictive value for estimation of the PMI (confidence interval of ±51 minutes at 95%) that can become an important complementary tool for traditional methods.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0056507 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 56507&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0056507

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056507

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().