Forensic Context

A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-135a-5p exhibits semen specificity and high abundance in normal semen [Tian et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2017.12.010], with distinctly higher expression levels in semen compared to other body fluids [Sauer et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.01.018]. Subsequent research confirmed the miR-135a-5p displays distinctly varying expression levels in semen compared to other body fluids and was selected as one of 12 key features for a multi-class support vector machine classification model, which achieved 98% accuracy on an independent test set for forensic body fluid identification [Li et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2024.103180].