A miRNome analysis at the early postmortem interval

The post-mortem interval (PMI) is the time that elapses since the death of an individual until the body is found. Different molecules have been analyzed to better estimate the PMI with variable results. The miRNAs draw attention in the forensic field to estimate the PMI, since they can better support degradation. To find potential biomarkers for PMI estimation, we analyzed the miRNome at early PMI in rat skeletal muscle using the Affymetrix GeneChip™ miRNA 4.0 micoarrays. In this dataset, we include the expression of 1218 rat miRNAs at early postmortem interval. A total of five rat skeletal muscle samples were obtained from a post-mortem interval rat model which was previously established in our laboratory [17]. The muscle samples correspond to Wistar rats that had 24 h of PMI. As a control group, we analyzed four skeletal muscle samples of rats that correspond to the 0 h of PMI, that were taken im-mediately after euthanasia. The miRNome in the skeletal muscle samples, we used the Affymetrix GeneChip miRNA 4.0 Array (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA, USA). The Affymetrix GeneChip miRNA 4.0 Array. The CEL files were analyzed with the Affymetrix Transcriptome Analysis Console (TAC) Software. With this software, the probes intensities of the miRNAs were nor-malized, and the miRNA gene expression was calculated with the Robust Multi-chip Analysis (RMA), setting the value of Detected Above Background (DABG) to 0.05. The changes of gene expression were expressed as Fold Change (FC), considering miRNAs over or down expressed with a threshold above >2 or below <2, respectively. Significant dysregulated miRNAs were those with p-value less than 0.01 and a False Discovery Rate value less than 0.05.