Review Study of the Application of Proteomics in Forensic Medicine

Protein is a major component of all biological evidence, often a matrix containing other biomolecules such as polynucleotides, lipids, carbohydrates, and small molecules. The proteins present in a sample reflect the transcriptional and translational program of the cell types of origin. For this reason, proteins can be used to identify body fluids and tissues, as well as to transmit genetic information in the form of single amino acid polymorphisms and the result of non-synonymous SNPs. This study examines the application and potential of proteomics in forensic medicine and examines the historical role that protein analysis has played in the development of forensic science. This review highlights how innovations in proteomic mass spectrometry have overcome many of the historical limitations of forensic protein science and how the application of forensic proteomics differs from proteomics in the life sciences. Two developing applications of forensic proteomics are reviewed in detail: body fluid and tissue identification and proteomics genotyping. This review then highlights emerging areas of proteomics that have the potential to impact forensic medicine in the near future, including fingerprint analysis, species identification, peptide toxicology, proteomic species estimation, and postmortem interval estimation. Finally, this review highlights some of the more recent innovations in proteomics that may guide further development of the field.