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A preliminary study on postmortem interval estimation of suffocated rats by GC-MS/MS-based plasma metabolic profiling

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Abstract

Estimation of postmortem interval (PMI) is an important goal in judicial autopsy. Although many approaches can estimate PMI through physical findings and biochemical tests, accurate PMI calculation by these conventional methods remains difficult because PMI is readily affected by surrounding conditions, such as ambient temperature and humidity. In this study, Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats (10 weeks) were sacrificed by suffocation, and blood was collected by dissection at various time intervals (0, 3, 6, 12, 24, and 48 h; n = 6) after death. A total of 70 endogenous metabolites were detected in plasma by gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS). Each time group was separated from each other on the principal component analysis (PCA) score plot, suggesting that the various endogenous metabolites changed with time after death. To prepare a prediction model of a PMI, a partial least squares (or projection to latent structure, PLS) regression model was constructed using the levels of significantly different metabolites determined by variable importance in the projection (VIP) score and the Kruskal-Wallis test (P < 0.05). Because the constructed PLS regression model could successfully predict each PMI, this model was validated with another validation set (n = 3). In conclusion, plasma metabolic profiling demonstrated its ability to successfully estimate PMI under a certain condition. This result can be considered to be the first step for using the metabolomics method in future forensic casework.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (grant No. 25460880).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Legal Medicine, Osaka Medical College, 2-7 Daigakumachi, Takatsuki, Osaka, 568-8686, Japan

    Takako Sato, Kento Tsuboi, Masakatsu Nomura, Shuntaro Abe, Hitoshi Tsuchihashi & Koichi Suzuki

  2. Department of Legal Medicine and Bioethics, Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya University, 65 Tsurumai-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya, 466-8550, Japan

    Kei Zaitsu, Maiko Kusano & Akira Ishii

  3. Forensic Science Laboratory, Osaka Prefectural Police Headquarters, 1-3-18 Honmachi, Chuo-ku, Osaka, 541-0053, Japan

    Noriaki Shima

Authors
  1. Takako Sato
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  2. Kei Zaitsu
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  3. Kento Tsuboi
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  4. Masakatsu Nomura
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  5. Maiko Kusano
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  6. Noriaki Shima
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  7. Shuntaro Abe
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  8. Akira Ishii
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  9. Hitoshi Tsuchihashi
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  10. Koichi Suzuki
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Correspondence to Takako Sato.

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Sato, T., Zaitsu, K., Tsuboi, K. et al. A preliminary study on postmortem interval estimation of suffocated rats by GC-MS/MS-based plasma metabolic profiling. Anal Bioanal Chem 407, 3659–3665 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-015-8584-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-015-8584-7

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