Forensic Context

A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-126-3p exhibits higher expression in blood samples (peripheral and menstrual) compared to other body fluids [Li et al. DOI:10.1007/s00414-021-02678-w]. Another human study confirmed that the miR-126-3p shows considerably lower expression levels in saliva, semen, and vaginal secretion compared to blood in pooled samples, though expression in menstrual blood overlapped with semen in individual samples [Sauer et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.01.018]. A study in rats and humans demonstrated that plasma exosomal miR-126-3p is a potential biomarker for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), as its levels were significantly different in the serum of AMI patients compared with healthy controls [Zhou et al. DOI:10.007/s00414-025-03583-2]. In a separate forensic investigation in humans, the miR-126-3p was validated as a body fluid-specific miRNA marker for peripheral blood identification and was one of 12 key features selected for a multi-class support vector machine classification model, which achieved 98% accuracy on an independent test set [Li et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2024.103180].