Forensic Context

A study in humans identified the miR-484 as a novel, highly overexpressed marker for blood identification, demonstrating high sensitivity and specificity with an AUC of 0.99 [Park et al. DOI:10.1002/elps.201400075]. Subsequent research in humans validated the miR-484 as the most stable reference gene across five body fluids, incorporating it into an optimal two-reference gene combination for data normalization and using it to construct a multi-class support vector machine classification model that achieved 98% accuracy on an independent test set [Li et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2024.103180]. A study in humans and several animal species (cat, dog, rabbit, horse, tortoise) demonstrated that the miR-484 was originally used as a housekeeping marker but was mainly detected in blood and menstrual blood and was hardly detectable in semen, saliva, and vaginal secretions, leading to its replacement by miR-320a-3p in the validated mRNA/miRNA multiplex assay [Bamberg et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2024.103129].