Abstract
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 mastec- tomy 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 transcription- polymerase 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 collect- ed 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 evalu- ate different target mRNA sequences are necessary, as is exploration of additional methods to evaluate mRNA transcript degradation.
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