Forensic Context

A study in human FFPE brain tissues demonstrated that the miR-124-5p exhibited significantly higher expression in fatal traumatic brain injury cases compared to cardiovascular controls and its expression levels showed a significant positive correlation with agonal time in TBI deaths [Bonin et al. DOI:10.3390/ijms241310836]. In a separate forensic application for body fluid identification, the miR-124-5p exhibited its highest expression in vaginal secretion, though with some overlap with other fluids, and was used in combination with hsa-miR-203a-3p to differentiate saliva and vaginal secretion in a validated qPCR-based decision algorithm [Sauer et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.01.018]. A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-124-5p is differentially expressed between monozygotic twins, as it was shared across two pairs of twins in a microarray analysis of blood samples, suggesting a potential role in forensic identification [Xiao et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2019.05.003].