Scientists ID potential biomarkers to peg time of death for submerged corpses

Enlarge / Ophelia (1852) by John Everett Millais, inspired by the character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, who goes mad and drowns in a brook. It can be challenging for forensic scientists to determine how long a dead body has been submerged in water.

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: identifying potential biomarkers (in mice) for pegging time of death in waterlogged corpses.

Correctly estimating time of death looks so easy in fictional police procedurals, but it's one of the more challenging aspects of a forensic pathologist's job. This is particularly true for corpses found in water, where a multitude of additional variables make it even more difficult to determine how long a body has been submerged. A team of scientists at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK, have hit upon a new method for making that determination, involving the measurement of levels of certain proteins in bones. They described their findings in an April paper in the Journal of Proteome Research.

Co-author Noemi Procopio has been interested in forensic science since she was 14, but initially studied biotechnology because her home country of Italy didn't have forensic science programs. When she moved to the University of Manchester in the UK to complete her PhD, she chose to specialize in the application of proteomics (the large-scale study of proteins) to the field, thanks to the influence of a former supervisor, an archaeologist who applied proteomics to bones.

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