UCLan scientists working on revolutionary new technology which could help solve crimes

The new technology could answer two paramount questions for those working to solve crimes involving human remains: when did a person die, and what was their age at the time of death?

This information is notoriously difficult to establish definitively, and current estimations tend to be subjective, relying on the expertise and opinion of individual forensic scientists.

Moreover, most of the techniques developed so far to estimate the post-mortem interval of victims (the time elapsed from death) rely on evaluations performed on soft tissues, but these are only present for a short period after death, so if the victim is found months later, these tissues have often disappeared.

Meanwhile, techniques aimed at establishing the age-at-death often rely on the completeness of the skeleton to look for specific structural traits but if only some bones are recovered, as is often the case for cold cases victims or those involved in disasters, then it is difficult to get an accurate picture.

However, new technological advances mean that forensic scientists can extract biological information – namely genetic, protein and metabolite –from very small amounts of materials, such as bone fragments, which together present a specific ‘signature’.

UCLan’s team, led by Dr Noemi Procopio, a Senior Research Fellow in Forensic Taphonomy, is now exploring how the different signatures of the biomolecules could be layered to give a more accurate picture of when a person died, and how old they were.

To explore this, the team is working with anthropological facilities in America, which will allow for the collection and sampling of human bones with a wide variety of ages and post-mortem intervals. The bone samples will be used to extract biological information, and detailed analyses will be performed on these to extract quantifiable features associated with time and age of death.

All the recovered information will then be combined with advanced bioinformatics tools to allow the UCLan team to develop a mathematical model that will bring a standard way of establishing when someone died, and at what age.

Dr Procopio explains: “We’re applying some of the most cutting-edge technologies available in modern biology and biochemistry laboratories – it’s a new way of doing things, and we’re calling it ‘Forens-OMICS’. It’s the first global application of several ‘omics’ technologies to try and answer, with much more accuracy, two of the most important questions that forensics scientists might need to answer to solve a crime; when and at what age a person died.

“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 kit will also allow ‘non-omics’ experts to get fundamental investigative clues that will help to improve the outcome of unsolved crimes and of future crimes involving the presence of skeletonised or highly fragmented remains.”

The research, which was funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, has been published in the prestigious journal eLife.