Forensic Context

A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-891a-5p exhibits exclusive specific amplification in semen samples, confirming its semen specificity [Sauer et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.01.018]. A subsequent proof-of-principle study confirmed the overexpression of the miR-891a-5p in semen and applied probabilistic methods to miRNA quantitative data, where a Naive Bayes model using this marker achieved up to 100% prediction accuracy for body fluid identification in test sets [Li et al. DOI:10.1007/s00414-021-02678-w]. A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-891a-5p is a semen-specific microRNA marker, being highly expressed only in semen and effectively used for semen identification [Altmeyer et al. DOI:10.1002/elps.202400089]. Another human study confirmed the miR-891a-5p is highly expressed in semen and detected at low levels or not detected in other body fluids, and it was a key component of a seven-microRNA probabilistic discriminant model that correctly identified semen samples with high posterior probability [Fujimoto et al. DOI:10.1038/s41598-019-50796-8].