Applications of Metabolomics in Forensic Toxicology and Forensic Medicine

Abstract

Forensic toxicology and forensic medicine are unique among all other medical fields because of their essential legal impact, especially in civil and criminal cases. New high-throughput technologies, borrowed from chemistry and physics, have proven that metabolomics, the youngest of the "omics sciences", could be one of the most powerful tools for monitoring changes in forensic disciplines. Metabolomics is a particular method that allows for the measurement of metabolic changes in a multicellular system using two different approaches: targeted and untargeted. Targeted studies are focused on a known number of defined metabolites. Untargeted metabolomics aims to capture all metabolites present in a sample. Different statistical approaches (e.g., uni- or multivariate statistics, machine learning) can be applied to extract useful and important information in both cases. This review aims to describe the role of metabolomics in forensic toxicology and in forensic medicine.

Keywords: drugs of abuse; forensic medicine; forensic toxicology; metabolomics; postmortem interval.

Figure 1

Metabolic pathway analysis performed for significant metabolites reported in rat plasma samples. Metabolic pathway analysis was carried out with MetaboAnalyst 5.0 software. Ten most significant pathways are marked with the numbers: (1) aminoacyl-tRNA biosynthesis, (2) alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism, (3) glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism, (4) arginine biosynthesis, (5) citrate cycle (TCA cycle), (6) glycine, serine, and threonine metabolism, (7) valine, leucine and isoleucine biosynthesis, (8) glutathione metabolism, (9) pantothenate and CoA biosynthesis, and (10) pyruvate metabolism.