The development of a forensic clock to determine time of death

The time and date of a person’s death are of great value in forensic investigations. The current time of death estimation techniques however provide large error ranges, especially when post-mortem interval exceeds 24 h. Circadian biomarkers have previously proven their potential use as forensic molecular clock markers to estimate blood-deposition time. More intriguingly, circadian biomarkers identified from the brain transcriptome were also able to estimate time of death. In order to develop a forensic molecular clock for post-mortem blood samples, we designed a study to identify circadian markers in three different classes of circadian molecules using post-mortem blood samples obtained from deceased individuals with a known time of death: mRNA transcripts using RNA-Seq, metabolites with LC–MS/MS and hormone concentrations using ELISA. The current manuscript discusses the melatonin and cortisol results.status: publishe