Division of Legal Medicine, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, 7-5-1 Kusunoki-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe 650-0017, Japan.
Int J Legal Med. 2013 Jul;127(4):783-90. doi: 10.1007/s00414-012-0806-3. Epub 2012 Dec 18.
Environmental factors such as outside temperature at the time of death are very important for forensic diagnoses and police investigations. In particular, death in a cold environment is associated with factors of forensic interest, including hypothermia, drowning in cold water, or postmortem body movement by a suspect. Hypothermia raises a special problem because of the difficulty of evaluation during autopsy. We describe here a unique method of estimating antemortem environmental temperature, involving the immunohistochemical analysis of HSP70 expression patterns in glomerular podocytes. Using this method, we found that HSP70 was present in glomerular podocytes at autopsy and that HSP70 was highly expressed, mainly in the nucleus of podocytes, in deaths associated with exposure to cold. Interestingly, this expression pattern was specific to death in a cold environment, including hypothermia and drowning in cold water. Analysis of the pattern of HSP70 expression in glomeruli may therefore be very useful in forensic diagnosis, for determining whether the antemortem environmental temperature was low. Moreover, immunohistochemical and real-time PCR assays of the molecular mechanism of HSP70 and HSF1 expression in glomeruli following exposure to cold indicated that HSP70 was rapidly translocated to the nucleus of podocytes following exposure to cold, but without new protein synthesis.
环境因素，如死亡时的外界温度，对于法医诊断和警方调查非常重要。特别是在寒冷环境中的死亡与法医感兴趣的因素有关，包括体温过低、在冷水中溺水或死后嫌疑人移动尸体。体温过低引起了一个特殊的问题，因为在尸检期间很难评估。我们在这里描述了一种独特的方法来估计生前环境温度，涉及 HSP70 表达模式在肾小球足细胞中的免疫组化分析。使用这种方法，我们发现 HSP70 存在于尸检中的肾小球足细胞中，并且 HSP70 在与暴露于寒冷相关的死亡中高度表达，主要在足细胞的核中。有趣的是，这种表达模式是死亡在寒冷环境中的特异性，包括体温过低和在冷水中溺水。因此，分析肾小球中 HSP70 表达模式可能在法医诊断中非常有用，用于确定生前环境温度是否较低。此外，对 HSP70 和 HSF1 在冷暴露后在肾小球中的表达的分子机制的免疫组织化学和实时 PCR 检测表明，HSP70 在冷暴露后迅速转移到足细胞的核中，但没有新的蛋白质合成。
