A novel approach for the forensic diagnosis of drowning by microbiological analysis with next-generation sequencing and unweighted UniFrac-based PCoA
A novel approach for the forensic diagnosis of drowning by microbiological analysis with next-generation sequencing and unweighted UniFrac-based PCoA
复制标题
一种通过微生物分析、新一代测序和基于 UniFrac 的未加权 PCoA 进行溺水法医诊断的新方法
DOI：
10.1007/s00414-020-02358-1
复制
发表时间：
2020-07-02
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Zhao, Rui
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Wang, Lin-Lin;Zhang, Fu-Yuan;Zhao, Rui
溺水的诊断是法医实践中的主要挑战之一，特别是当尸体处于腐烂状态时。法医学领域需要新的溺水指标。近十年来，水生细菌因能随溺水介质轻易进入血液循环，部分能在尸体内增殖，引起法医专家的高度重视。最近，下一代测序（NGS）的出现为有效分析整个微生物群落创造了新的机会，并促进了法医微生物学的发展。我们推测NGS可能是诊断溺水的潜在方法。在本研究中，我们验证了这一假设的基础实验中淹死和死后淹没大鼠模型。我们的研究表明，用NGS检测细菌群落，并以透明的方式处理数据与unweighted UniFrac-based主坐标分析（PCoA）可以清楚地区分皮肤，肺，血液和肝脏标本的溺水组和死后淹没组。此外，所获得的信息可用于查明新的案件。综上所述，这些结果表明，我们可以建立一个微生物数据库的溺水和死后淹没受害者的NGS，随后使用生物信息学方法来诊断溺水在未来的法医实践。
The diagnosis of drowning is one of the major challenges in forensic practice, especially when the corpse is in a state of decomposition. Novel indicators of drowning are desired in the field of forensic medicine. In the past decade, aquatic bacteria have attracted great attention from forensic experts because they can easily enter the blood circulation with drowning medium, and some of them can proliferate in the corpse. Recently, the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has created new opportunities to efficiently analyze whole microbial communities and has catalyzed the development of forensic microbiology. We presumed that NGS could be a potential method for diagnosing drowning. In the present study, we verified this hypothesis by fundamental experiments in drowned and postmortem-submersed rat models. Our study revealed that detecting the bacterial communities with NGS and processing the data in a transparent way with unweighted UniFrac-based principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) could clearly discriminate the skin, lung, blood, and liver specimens of the drowning group and postmortem submersion group. Furthermore, the acquired information could be used to identify new cases. Taken together, these results suggest that we could build a microbial database of drowned and postmortem-submersed victims by NGS and subsequently use a bioinformatic method to diagnose drowning in future forensic practice.