Abstract
Establishing the tissue source of epithelial cells within a biological sample is an important capability for forensic laboratories. In this study we used Imaging Flow Cytometry (IFC) to analyze individual cells recovered from buccal, epidermal, and vaginal samples that had been dried between 24 hours and more than eight weeks. Measurements capturing the size, shape, and fluorescent properties of cells were collected in an automated manner and then used to build a multivariate statistical framework for differentiating cells based on tissue type. Results showed that epidermal cells could be distinguished from vaginal and buccal cells using a discriminant function analysis of IFC measurements with an average classification accuracy of ~94%. Ultimately, cellular measurements such as these, which can be obtained non-destructively, may provide probative information for many types of biological samples and complement results from standard genetic profiling techniques.
Highlights
Characterizing the type of cells present in biological evidence and, the tissue they originated from within the body, can assist with crime reconstructions and downstream DNA profiling methods
Circular features with a size consistent with nuclei (~8μm), were observed in the center of many of the buccal cells and vaginal cells (e.g., Images 1507, 1796, respectively, Fig 1), while they were rarely observed in epidermal cell images
Buccal and vaginal cells were generally larger in size, >40 μm compared to epidermal cells, which were ~20–50 μm we noted some size overlap between cell sources
Summary
Characterizing the type of cells present in biological evidence and, the tissue they originated from within the body, can assist with crime reconstructions and downstream DNA profiling methods. There has been considerable research into biomolecular markers for tissue identification. These include mRNA transcripts [1], micro-RNAs [2,3], proteomics [4], and DNA methylation patterns [5]. Few forensic techniques have utilized morphological or intrinsic biochemical differences to differentiate between cells from different tissues, epithelial cells. This is likely due to the laborious nature of microscopic characterizations or the need for tissue-specific antibody probes which have limited success on dried or compromised samples
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