Abstract
Forensic toxicology and forensic medicine are unique among all other medical fields because of their essential legal impact, especially in civil and criminal cases. New high-throughput technologies, borrowed from chemistry and physics, have proven that metabolomics, the youngest of the “omics sciences”, could be one of the most powerful tools for monitoring changes in forensic disciplines. Metabolomics is a particular method that allows for the measurement of metabolic changes in a multicellular system using two different approaches: targeted and untargeted. Targeted studies are focused on a known number of defined metabolites. Untargeted metabolomics aims to capture all metabolites present in a sample. Different statistical approaches (e.g., uni- or multivariate statistics, machine learning) can be applied to extract useful and important information in both cases. This review aims to describe the role of metabolomics in forensic toxicology and in forensic medicine.
Highlights
IntroductionFiehn wrote that “Metabolites are the end products of the cellular regulatory processes, and their levels can be regarded as the ultimate response of biological systems to genetic or environmental changes.”
Metabolomics techniques can be useful for indicating novel biomarkers with better diagnostic performance than those already existing [8] or estimating mortality risk in global disease [9]
To give an overview of the metabolic pathways to which metabolites significantly related to PMI belong, an inter-study pathway analysis was performed for rat plasma samples using MetaboAnalyst 5.0 (Figure 1 and Table 3)
Summary
Fiehn wrote that “Metabolites are the end products of the cellular regulatory processes, and their levels can be regarded as the ultimate response of biological systems to genetic or environmental changes.”. In addition to this idea, he stated: “In parallel to the terms ‘transcriptome’ and ‘proteome’, the set of metabolites synthesized by a biological system constitute its ‘metabolome’ [1]. Metabolomics techniques can be useful for indicating novel biomarkers with better diagnostic performance than those already existing [8] or estimating mortality risk in global disease (e.g., acute myocardial infarction) [9]. Analyses of metabolic pathways might be successfully used to explore consumption behavior, differentiate between acute or chronic drug use, or to find the underlying mode of toxicological action in humans [11]
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