Validation of Recently Discovered mRNA Stable Regions as Biomarkers for Body Fluids after Exposure to Environmental Hazards

Abstract

The recognition of messenger RNA become common practice for body fluid identification in forensic field. Though, the degraded and rare nature of RNA from forensic samples point out that mRNA transcripts are not reliably spotted or remain undetected in practice. Thus, leading to hardening the process of forensic investigation and body fluids identification. Lately, using massively parallel sequencing technique, data obtained from degraded body fluids were used to design new primers to amplify transcript regions of messenger RNA of high read coverage, hence, exhibiting higher stability, as a substitute of the conventional primer that target span exon–exon boundaries which showed low stability and degradation susceptibility. In the current project, the relative gene expression was calculated for each biomarker to measure the stability of those messenger RNA regions. The criteria of testing involved exposing different messenger RNA biomarkers transcripts of blood, buccal cells and menstrual blood to various environmental hazards including UV irradiation, 40?C induced heat and 50% humidity. Degradation was in continuous exposure for a specific time span of 2 weeks. The results showed that each messenger RNA biomarker behaved differently among the different environmental insults.