Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, California 94550, United States.
Department of Chemistry, Michigan State University, 578 S Shaw Ln, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, United States.
J Proteome Res. 2020 Aug 7;19(8):3088-3099. doi: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00102. Epub 2020 Jun 4.
Evidence recovery is challenging where an explosion has occurred. Though hair evidence may be sufficiently robust to be recovered at the site, forensic analysis underutilizes the matrix by relying on morphological analysis. Where DNA is compromised, particularly in hair, protein-based human identification presents a promising alternative. Detection of amino acid polymorphisms in hair proteins as genetically variant peptides (GVPs) permits the inference of individualizing single nucleotide polymorphisms for identification. However, an explosive blast may damage hair proteins and compromise GVP identification. This work assesses effects of an explosive blast on the hair proteome and GVP identification, investigates microscopy as a predictor of proteome profiling success in recovered hairs to improve analysis throughput, and quantifies discriminative power in damaged hairs. The proteomics dataset has been deposited into the ProteomeXchange Consortium (PXD017427). With the exception of degradation in keratins K75, K80, K40, and keratin-associated protein KAP10-11 as markers of hair cuticular damage, corroborated by scanning electron microscopic analysis, minimal hair proteome degradation following explosion allowed successful proteome profiling of single hairs regardless of morphological damage. Finally, GVP identification remained independent of explosion conditions, permitting similar discriminative power between exploded and undamaged hairs. These findings lend greater confidence to GVP analysis in one-inch hairs for forensic identification and provide information about hair protein localization.
在发生爆炸的情况下，证据的恢复具有挑战性。虽然毛发证据可能足够坚固，可以在现场回收，但法医分析并没有充分利用基质，而是依赖形态分析。在 DNA 受到损害的情况下，特别是在毛发中，基于蛋白质的人类识别技术提供了一种很有前途的替代方法。检测毛发蛋白质中的氨基酸多态性作为遗传变异肽（GVPs），可以推断出个体的单核苷酸多态性用于识别。然而，爆炸可能会损坏毛发蛋白质并影响 GVP 的识别。这项工作评估了爆炸对毛发蛋白质组和 GVP 识别的影响，研究了显微镜作为预测回收毛发中蛋白质组谱分析成功的方法，以提高分析通量，并量化受损毛发的区分能力。该蛋白质组学数据集已被存入蛋白质组交换联合体（PXD017427）。除了角蛋白 K75、K80、K40 和角蛋白相关蛋白 KAP10-11 的降解作为毛发角质层损伤的标志物，以及扫描电子显微镜分析的证实外，爆炸后毛发蛋白质组的降解很少，这使得可以成功地对单根毛发进行蛋白质组谱分析，而不受形态损伤的影响。最后，GVP 的识别与爆炸条件无关，这使得爆炸和未受损毛发之间具有相似的区分能力。这些发现为 GVP 分析在一英寸毛发的法医鉴定中提供了更大的信心，并提供了有关毛发蛋白质定位的信息。
