Forensic Context

A study in humans demonstrated that the mir-331 (hsa-miR-331-3p) in peripheral whole blood was significantly positively correlated with age in a microarray analysis of 109 physiologically unaffected individuals, with a correlation coefficient of 0.505 and a raw P value of 2.12E-07 [Meder et al. DOI:10.1373/clinchem.2014.224238]. In a separate pilot study using a Göttingen minipig model of lethal total body irradiation, the mir-331 (ssc-miR-331-3p) in plasma was identified as an early marker, being consistently down-regulated across all post-irradiation phases [Chakraborty et al. DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-45250-9]. A study in humans demonstrated that the mir-331 was significantly upregulated in the plasma of patients with plaque rupture compared to those with plaque erosion, and a diagnostic model combining it with two other miRNAs achieved an area under the ROC curve of 0.768 in an independent test set for distinguishing these plaque phenotypes in STEMI patients [Li et al. DOI:10.1016/j.ygeno.2020.11.019]. In a separate human postmortem study, the mir-331 was found to be upregulated in the prefrontal cortex of subjects with schizophrenia [Smalheiser et al. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0086469].