The Effect of Elapsed Time on the Quantity of mRNA in Skin: A Study to Evaluate the Potential Forensic Use of mRNA to Determine the Postmortem Interval

Department of Pathology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea, songhyejong@gmail.com

Department of Forensic Medicine, Kyungpook National University School of Medicine, Daegu, Korea

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) has potential use in forensic science for the determination of postmortem interval. We report the first study on serial sampling of messenger RNA (mRNA) from surgical specimens to determine if there is a correlation between mRNA quantity and elapsed time. Skin tissues were collected from modified radical mastectomy specimens. After a defined period of time, bisected skin sections were cut and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Serial collection of the specimens was conducted, and frozen sections were obtained from all samples. Quantitative real-time reverse transcriptionpolymerase chain reaction was performed using the extracted RNA to measure the transcriptional activity of 2 selected housekeeping genes. The selected loci were mRNA sequences that exhibited time-dependent quantitative changes in a previous study. We collected 44 samples from 9 different patients, with 3-10 samples collected per patient. The amount of mRNA transcripts present in the serial samples showed a weak time-dependent correlation trend only in some cases. Further studies to evaluate different target mRNA sequences are necessary, as is exploration of additional methods to evaluate mRNA transcript degradation.

Key words : messenger RNA, postmortem interval, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction

Original article