Forensic Context

A study in humans identified hsa-miR-20a-5p as a candidate biomarker for blood identification, as it exhibited considerably lower expression levels in saliva, semen, and vaginal secretion compared to blood in pooled samples [Sauer et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.01.018]. A study in humans established a multi-class support vector machine (MSVM) classification model for forensic body fluid identification using TaqMan RT-qPCR, where the miR-20a-5p was evaluated as a body fluid-specific miRNA marker for peripheral blood identification, displaying relatively high but overlapping expression across all five tested body fluids (peripheral blood, saliva, semen, vaginal secretions, menstrual blood) [Li et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2024.103180]. In a separate investigation in humans, the miR-20a-5p was identified as a potential diagnostic biomarker for coronary artery disease, showing significant upregulation in patient plasma compared to controls and achieving an AUC of 0.892 in ROC analysis when validated by qRT-PCR [Zhong et al. DOI:10.1002/jcla.23020].