Zissler Angela, Stoiber Walter, Geissenberger Janine, Steinbacher Peter, Monticelli Fabio C, Pittner Stefan
Department of Biosciences, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.
Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.
Diagnostics (Basel). 2021 Jun 23;11(7):1146. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics11071146.
The present review provides an overview of the current research status on the effects of influencing factors on postmortem protein degradation used to estimate the PMI (postmortem interval). Focus was set on characteristics of internal and external influencing factors and the respective susceptibility and/or robustness of protein degradation. A systematic literature search up to December 2020 was conducted on the effect of influencing factors investigated in the context of postmortem protein degradation in the tissues of animals and humans using the scientific databases PubMed and Google Scholar, as well as the reference lists of eligible articles. We identified ten studies investigating a total of seven different influencing factors in degrading tissues/organs ( = 7) of humans and animals using six different methodological approaches. Although comparison of study outcomes was impeded by the high variety of investigated factors, and by high risk of bias appraisals, it was evident that the majority of the influencing factors concerned affected protein degradation, thus being able to modulate the precision of protein degradation-based PMI estimation. The results clearly highlight the need for a thorough screening for corresponding factors to enable the introduction of appropriate correction factors and exclusion criteria. This seems especially relevant for the protein degradation-based study of human PMI to increase the reliability and precision of the method and to facilitate a broader applicability in routine forensic casework.
本综述概述了用于估计死亡时间（PMI）的影响因素对死后蛋白质降解作用的当前研究现状。重点关注内部和外部影响因素的特征以及蛋白质降解各自的敏感性和/或稳定性。截至2020年12月，利用科学数据库PubMed和谷歌学术以及符合条件文章的参考文献列表，对动物和人类组织中死后蛋白质降解背景下所研究的影响因素的作用进行了系统的文献检索。我们确定了十项研究，这些研究使用六种不同的方法，共调查了人类和动物降解组织/器官（=7）中的七种不同影响因素。尽管研究结果的比较因所调查因素的高度多样性以及偏倚评估的高风险而受到阻碍，但很明显，大多数相关影响因素会影响蛋白质降解，从而能够调节基于蛋白质降解的PMI估计的精度。结果清楚地表明，需要对相应因素进行全面筛查，以便引入适当的校正因子和排除标准。这对于基于蛋白质降解的人类PMI研究似乎尤为重要，以提高该方法的可靠性和精度，并促进其在常规法医案件工作中的更广泛应用。
