New techniques led by Dr Noemi Procopio could help uncover when human remains are found when a person died and how old they were at the time of their death 🔍 uclan
– is now exploring is how the different signatures of the biomolecules could be layered to give a much more accurate picture of when a person died, and how old they were when they died: information that would be hugely useful in both forensic and archaeological fields.
To explore this further, the team is working with several anthropological facilities in America, which will allow for the collection and the sampling of human bones, with both a wide age range and a wide range of post-mortem intervals . The bone samples collected will be then used to extract DNA, proteins, metabolites and lipids, and detailed analyses will be performed on each of these specific biomolecules to extract quantifiable features associated with both time and age of death.
All the recovered information will then be combined with advanced bioinformatics tools . Putting all this information together will allow Noemi and her colleagues to develop a mathematical model that will bring a standard way of establishing when someone died, and at what age – rather than the much more subjective estimations that teams currently work with.
“At the moment, we’ve used a small sample of bones, and our research shows that a combination of approaches, using DNA, proteins, metabolites and lipids, makes biological sense. While we need to work with larger sample sizes to develop a formula, our ultimate aim is to develop a commercial kit that could be used by forensic examiners, police officers or researchers to make these estimations in an easy, quick, un-biased and reliable way.
The research, which was funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, has been published in the prestigious journal
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