School of Natural Sciences, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK.
Molecules. 2023 Jun 21;28(13):4899. doi: 10.3390/molecules28134899.
One of the key questions in forensic cases relates to some form of age inference, whether this is how old a crime scene is, when in time a particular crime was committed, or how old the victim was at the time of the crime. These age-related estimations are currently achieved through morphological methods with varying degrees of accuracy. As a result, biomolecular approaches are considered of great interest, with the relative abundances of several protein markers already recognized for their potential forensic significance; however, one of the greatest advantages of proteomic investigations over genomics ones is the wide range of post-translational modifications (PTMs) that make for a complex but highly dynamic resource of information. Here, we explore the abundance of several PTMs including the glycosylation, deamidation, and oxidation of several key proteins (collagen, fetuin A, biglycan, serum albumin, fibronectin and osteopontin) as being of potential value to the development of an age estimation tool worthy of further evaluation in forensic contexts. We find that glycosylations lowered into adulthood but deamidation and oxidation increased in the same age range.
在法医学案例中，有一个关键问题涉及到某种形式的年龄推断，无论是犯罪现场的年代，特定犯罪发生的时间，还是犯罪发生时受害者的年龄。这些与年龄相关的估计目前是通过形态学方法以不同的准确度来实现的。因此，生物分子方法被认为具有很大的研究兴趣，已经有几种蛋白质标记物的相对丰度因其潜在的法医学意义而得到认可；然而，与基因组学相比，蛋白质组学研究的最大优势之一是存在广泛的翻译后修饰（PTMs），这使得其成为一个复杂但极具动态的信息资源。在这里，我们探讨了几种 PTM 的丰度，包括几种关键蛋白质（胶原蛋白、胎球蛋白 A、大聚糖、血清白蛋白、纤维连接蛋白和骨桥蛋白）的糖基化、脱酰胺和氧化，这些 PTM 可能对开发一种年龄估计工具具有潜在价值，值得在法医背景下进一步评估。我们发现，糖基化在成年后降低，但脱酰胺和氧化在相同的年龄范围内增加。
