Application of microbiological examination in the estimation of postmortem interval

Abstract:

Postmortem interval (PMI) estimation is one of the important contents in forensic identification. In recent years, with the development of high-throughput sequencing, bioinformatics, and machine learning, the changes of microbial community structure provide a new possibility for PMI estimation. The evolution pattern of the microbial community in the process of decomposition can be used to predict PMI. From the nature of cadaver decomposition, we summarize the examination methods and applications of cadaver microbial changes, and discuss the problems and prospects of using the microbial community changes to predict PMI.