Journal of Forensic Medicine 2023;39(4):373-381

doi:10.12116/j.issn.1004-5619.2022.420510

Metabonomics Analysis of Brain Stem Tissue in Rats with Primary Brain Stem Injury Caused Death.

Qin SU 1 ; Qian-Ling CHEN 2 ; Wei-Bin WU 1 ; Qing-Qing XIANG 1 ; Cheng-Liang YANG 2 ; Dong-Fang QIAO 2 ; Zhi-Gang LI 1

Affiliations

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Keywords

cause of death; forensic pathology; liquid chromato-graphy-mass spectroscopy (LC-MS); metabonomics; partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA); primary brain stem injury; random forest algorithm; rats

Country

China

Language

English

Abstract

OBJECTIVES:To explore the potential biomarkers for the diagnosis of primary brain stem injury (PBSI) by using metabonomics method to observe the changes of metabolites in rats with PBSI caused death.

METHODS:PBSI, non-brain stem brain injury and decapitation rat models were established, and metabolic maps of brain stem were obtained by LC-MS metabonomics method and annotated to the HMDB database. Partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and random forest methods were used to screen potential biomarkers associated with PBSI diagnosis.

RESULTS:Eighty-six potential metabolic markers associated with PBSI were screened by PLS-DA. They were modeled and predicted by random forest algorithm with an accuracy rate of 83.3%. The 818 metabolic markers annotated to HMDB database were used for random forest modeling and prediction, and the accuracy rate was 88.9%. According to the importance in the identification of cause of death, the most important metabolic markers that were significantly up-regulated in PBSI group were HMDB0038126 (genipinic acid, GA), HMDB0013272 (N-lauroylglycine), HMDB0005199 [(R)-salsolinol] and HMDB0013645 (N,N-dimethylsphingosine).

CONCLUSIONS:GA, N-lauroylglycine, (R)-salsolinol and N,N-dimethylsphingosine are expected to be important metabolite indicators in the diagnosis of PBSI caused death, thus providing clues for forensic medicine practice.