Authors: Petra Boehme Philipp Spahn Jens Amendt Richard Zehner
Publish Date: 2012/05/04
Volume: 127, Issue: 1, Pages: 243-249
Abstract
Necrophagous blow fly larvae can provide accurate estimates of the minimum postmortem interval in death investigations During larval development predictable morphological changes occur and measurements of weight length and width are compared to speciesspecific growth curves for reliable age estimates However aging blow fly pupae is more challenging because morphological and anatomical changes are not visible with the naked eye Thus delicate preparation of the pupae or rearing to the adult stage seems unavoidable Conversely metamorphosis evokes a remodelling of the larval shape to adult structures and gene expression analysis potentially serves as a molecular tool to mirror the ageing process of a pupa The present study focuses on the differential expression of two newly described arbitrarily named genes 15 2 2014192 and two previously identified genes actin arylphorin receptor during Calliphora vicina Diptera Calliphoridae metamorphosis Quantification through realtime PCR revealed significant up and downregulation of these transcripts found to be temperature dependent and age specific hence a new possibility to age forensically important blow fly pupae
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