Forensic NMR metabolomics: one more arrow in the quiver
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Forensic NMR metabolomics: one more arrow in the quiver Emanuela Locci1,2 · Giovanni Bazzano1 · Alberto Chighine1 · Francesco Locco1 · Ernesto Ferraro1 · Roberto Demontis1 · Ernesto d’Aloja1 Received: 17 April 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Introduction NMR metabolomics is increasingly used in forensics, due to the possibility of investigating both endogenous metabolic profiles and exogenous molecules that may help to describe metabolic patterns and their modifications associated to specific conditions of forensic interest. Objectives The aim of this work was to review the recent literature and depict the information provided by NMR metabolomics. Attention has been devoted to the identification of peculiar metabolic signatures and specific ante-mortem and postmortem profiles or biomarkers related to different conditions of forensic concern, such as the identification of biological traces, the estimation of the time since death, and the exposure to drugs of abuse. Results and Conclusion The results of the described studies highlight how forensics can benefit from NMR metabolomics by gaining additional information that may help to shed light in several forensic issues that still deserve to be further elucidated. Keywords 1H NMR · Metabolomics · Forensics · Biological traces · Post-mortem interval · Drug abuse
1 Introduction Forensic science represents the application of several scientific disciplines, such as medicine, chemistry, physics, and biology to the sphere of criminal investigation. In a more confined context, like the legal medicine scenario, it is mainly focused in giving evidences to be used either in the criminal or in the civil justice system through the forensic implementation and validation of scientific methods originally developed for different purposes. In the last decades, forensic science addressed several issues, which in the previous period were an unmet need, due to the inadequacy of the available scientific tools. Challenges such as human individualization, toxicological analysis on different biological specimens, and reproducible evaluation of pathological findings during autopsy have been solved by the introduction of DNA profile analysis on * Emanuela Locci [email protected] 1
Department of Medical Sciences and Public Health, Section of Legal Medicine, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
Department of Medical Sciences and Public Health, Legal Medicine Section, University of Cagliari, Cittadella Universitaria di Monserrato, 09042 Monserrato, CA, Italy
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smaller and smaller stains (Prinz and Lessig 2014), by the development of Gas Chromatography (GC), Liquid Chromatography (LC), and Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) combined with Mass or Tandem-Mass Spectrometry (MS or MS/MS) methods for quantification of several drugs and their metabolites in human biological fluids (BFs) (Gottardo et al. 2012; Drummer and Gerostamoulos 2014), and by the implementation of advanced imaging tools in the identification of the cause of d
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