Homicide or car accident: The case of the 'guilty' fibre.

Crime scene investigation should be carried out using a critical forensic approach by an expert team. This provides essential tools in the research and collection of evidence and samples which must be integrated with the autopsy and the police officers' investigations. This paper aims to highlight the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to crime scene investigation and describes a very interesting criminal case.

Decomposing Human Blood: Canine Detection Odor Signature and Volatile Organic Compounds.

The admissibility of human "odor mortis" discrimination in courts depends on the lack of comprehension of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during the human decay process and of the lack in standardized procedures in training cadaver dogs. Blood was collected from four young people who died from traffic accidents and analyzed using HS-SPME/GC-MS at different decompositional stages. Two dogs, professionally trained, were tested to exactly locate blood samples, for each time point of the experiment.

Confocal laser scanning microscope, Raman microscopy and Western blotting to evaluate inflammatory response after myocardial infarction.

Cardiac muscle necrosis is associated with inflammatory cascade that clears the infarct from dead cells and matrix debris, and then replaces the damaged tissue with scar, through three overlapping phases: the inflammatory phase, the proliferative phase and the maturation phase. Western blotting, laser confocal microscopy, Raman microscopy are valuable tools for studying the inflammatory response following myocardial infarction both humoral and cellular phase, allowing the identification and semiquantitative analysis of proteins produced during the inflammatory cascade activation and the topographical distribution and expression of proteins and cells involved in myocardial inflammation. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) is a relatively new technique for microscopic imaging, that allows greater resolution, optical sectioning of the sample and three-dimensional reconstruction of the same sample.

Sudden infant death in an 8-month-old baby with dengue virus infection: searching for virus in postmortem tissues by immunohistochemistry and Western blotting.

Sudden infant death due to dengue virus infection is very rare. An 8-month-old male infant was found unresponsive during a nap in his nursery school. We emphasize the usefulness of dengue viral antigens as a postmortem diagnostic technique to demonstrate the presence of virus in human tissue specimens by immunohistochemistry and Western blotting.