Degradation of cardiac troponin t in human skeletal muscle: a molecular approach in postmortem interval estimation

Estimation of Post-mortem Interval (PMI) is an integral part of medico-legal investigation. In most unwitnessed death investigation, the knowledge of PMI is important as it gives a preliminary idea of the time of assault. The well-known methods for PMI estimation such as algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, putrefaction, forensic entomology, etc. are useful within 72 hours of death. The purpose of present study is to overcome this limitation by using sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) and western blotting to analyse time course of degradation pattern of cardiac troponin T (cTnT) until postmortem. Our results showed cTnT degraded into two degraded products 1 and 2 (cTnT dp 1 and 2) in a certain and ordinary fashion. Logistic regression analysis showed no correlation between cTnT degradation and PMI. No correlation was found between confounding factors and cTnT degradation. To conclude, the degradation of cTnT can be used as a method of PMI estimation especially in the time interval for more than 24 hours.