IL RUOLO E LE APPLICAZIONI FORENSI DELLA PROTEOMICA NELLO STUDIO DEL POST MORTEM INTERVAL: DALL’EPOCA ALL’ORA DELLA MORTE. I RISULTATI DI UNO STUDIO SPERIMENTALE PRELIMINARE

Time of death represents a real challenge in forensic research. To date, the PMI (Post Mortem Interval) estimation is still carried out by analyzing abiotic and transformative cadaveric processes. However, the diagnosis of time of death is not always accurate because of multiple variables that can affect its proper retrodation. In order to reduce the degree of approximation of the calculation, many authors suggested the application of various approaches in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology, including DNA, RNA, microRNA, and protein analysis. In particular, several studies investigated the quantitative and qualitative variations of protein expression on postmortem biological samples at certain time intervals, both on animals and humans. The aim of this review is to examine all the forensic literature published over the last 20 years regarding the application of proteomics in the calculation of PMI. The review was performed according to specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. This review highlights the validity of some markers as "proteic timers", considering the results on the evidences obtained in the early post-mortem interval on the muscle, brain, and blood. This study demonstrates how proteomics can be a valuable tool for estimating the PMI, although there are still technical limits in the analysis performed on humans, mainly due to the inability to obtain samples from the precise moment of death. This limitation would be crucial in achieving high specificity and sensitivity of the markers obtained so far from research in this field.