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A novel approach for the forensic diagnosis of drowning by microbiological analysis with next-generation sequencing and unweighted UniFrac-based PCoA

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Abstract

The diagnosis of drowning is one of the major challenges in forensic practice, especially when the corpse is in a state of decomposition. Novel indicators of drowning are desired in the field of forensic medicine. In the past decade, aquatic bacteria have attracted great attention from forensic experts because they can easily enter the blood circulation with drowning medium, and some of them can proliferate in the corpse. Recently, the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has created new opportunities to efficiently analyze whole microbial communities and has catalyzed the development of forensic microbiology. We presumed that NGS could be a potential method for diagnosing drowning. In the present study, we verified this hypothesis by fundamental experiments in drowned and postmortem-submersed rat models. Our study revealed that detecting the bacterial communities with NGS and processing the data in a transparent way with unweighted UniFrac-based principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) could clearly discriminate the skin, lung, blood, and liver specimens of the drowning group and postmortem submersion group. Furthermore, the acquired information could be used to identify new cases. Taken together, these results suggest that we could build a microbial database of drowned and postmortem-submersed victims by NGS and subsequently use a bioinformatic method to diagnose drowning in future forensic practice.

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Funding

This study was financially supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFC0807204), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 81801874, 81871529, 81971793), Liaoning Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 20180550722), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2019 M651170).

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Author notes

  1. Lin-Lin Wang and Fu-Yuan Zhang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forensic Pathology, China Medical University School of Forensic Medicine, Shenyang, China

    Lin-Lin Wang, Fu-Yuan Zhang, Wen-Wen Dong, Long-Long Suo,  Jian Cheng, Miao Zhang, Xiang-Shen Guo, Peng-Hao Jiang, Da-Wei Guan & Rui Zhao

  2. Collaborative Laboratory of Intelligentized Forensic Science, Shenyang, China

    Lin-Lin Wang, Fu-Yuan Zhang, Chang-Liang Wang, Miao Zhang, Da-Wei Guan & Rui Zhao

  3. People’s Procuratorate of Liaoning Province, Shenyang, China

    Chang-Liang Wang

  4. The Third Clinical Department, China Medical University, Shenyang, China

    Xue-Ying Liang

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  1. Lin-Lin Wang
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Contributions

R Zhao and D Guan conceived and designed the research. L Wang and F Zhang wrote the main manuscript text and performed the lab experiments. W Dong, X Liang, C Wang, L Suo, and J Cheng performed the animal experiments. M Zhang, X Guo, and P Jiang performed the bioinformatic analysis. All authors have read and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Da-Wei Guan or Rui Zhao.

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical statement

The use of animals was approved by the Animal Experiment Committee of China Medical University. All experiments were conducted according to the guidelines of the National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.

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Wang, LL., Zhang, FY., Dong, WW. et al. A novel approach for the forensic diagnosis of drowning by microbiological analysis with next-generation sequencing and unweighted UniFrac-based PCoA. Int J Legal Med 134, 2149–2159 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-020-02358-1

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