A cardinal symptom of major depressive disorder (MDD) is the disruption of circadian patterns. However, to date, there is no direct evidence of circadian clock dysregulation in the brains of patients who have MDD. Circadian rhythmicity of gene expression has been observed in animals and peripheral human tissues, but its presence and variability in the human brain were difficult to characterize. Here, we applied time-of-death analysis to gene expression data from high-quality postmortem brains, examining 24-h cyclic patterns in six cortical and limbic regions of 55 subjects with no history of psychiatric or neurological illnesses (“controls”) and 34 patients with MDD. Our dataset covered ∼12,000 transcripts in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and cerebellum. Several hundred transcripts in each region showed 24-h cyclic patterns in controls, and >100 transcripts exhibited consistent rhythmicity and phase synchrony across regions. Among the top-ranked rhythmic genes were the canonical clock genes BMAL1(ARNTL), PER1-2-3, NR1D1(REV-ERBa), DBP, BHLHE40 (DEC1), and BHLHE41(DEC2). The phasing of known circadian genes was consistent with data derived from other diurnal mammals. Cyclic patterns were much weaker in the brains of patients with MDD due to shifted peak timing and potentially disrupted phase relationships between individual circadian genes. This transcriptome-wide analysis of the human brain demonstrates a rhythmic rise and fall of gene expression in regions outside of the suprachiasmatic nucleus in control subjects. The description of its breakdown in MDD suggests potentially important molecular targets for treatment of mood disorders.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/24/9950.full.pdf

Circadian patterns of gene expression in the human brain and disruption in major depressive disorder

Effect of eluent on the ionization process in liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Recent research has explored the possibility of extracting ancillary information from primary biometric traits viz., face, fingerprints, hand geometry, and iris. This ancillary information includes personal attributes, such as gender, age, ethnicity, hair color, height, weight, and so on. Such attributes are known as soft biometrics and have applications in surveillance and indexing biometric databases. These attributes can be used in a fusion framework to improve the matching accuracy of a primary biometric system (e.g., fusing face with gender information), or can be used to generate qualitative descriptions of an individual (e.g., young Asian female with dark eyes and brown hair). The latter is particularly useful in bridging the semantic gap between human and machine descriptions of the biometric data. In this paper, we provide an overview of soft biometrics and discuss some of the techniques that have been proposed to extract them from the image and the video data. We also introduce a taxonomy for organizing and classifying soft biometric attributes, and enumerate the strengths and limitations of these attributes in the context of an operational biometric system. Finally, we discuss open research problems in this field. This survey is intended for researchers and practitioners in the field of biometrics.

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What Else Does Your Biometric Data Reveal? A Survey on Soft Biometrics

Estimation of stature from dimensions of hands and feet in a North Indian population

http://forensicentomologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/forensic-anthropology.pdf

Forensic anthropology: developments of a classical discipline in the new millennium

Ziel dieser Arbeit war es, die Ergebnisse der serologischen Untersuchungen von Knochen, die dem Verwesungsprozes unterlagen, zu objektivieren. Die untersuchten Knochenteile wurden dem Schenkelknochen entnommen. Ein Teil von ihnen war ein paar Jahre dem Verwesungsprozes ausgesetzt. Die Knochenproben wurden dann mit Hilfe der Absorptions-Elutionsmethode nach klassischen Regeln untersucht, wobei letztlich die eluierten Antikorper weiteren Verdunnungen unterzogen wurden, um die „Antigenkraft“ des untersuchten Materials zu bestimmen. Es wurde festgestellt, das aufgrund des Verwesungsprozesses der Knochen eine Verringerung der ursprunglichen „Antigenkraft“ auftritt, die von schwachen, untypischen serologischen Reaktionen begleitet wird, deren Kraft wesentlich schwacher als die typischer ist. Es wird angenommen, das nur der Verdunnungsbereich, der den der untypischen Agglutinationen uberschreitet, als diagnostisch bei der Interpretation der tatsachlichen Gruppenzugehorigkeit verwester Knochen anerkannt werden sollte.

Determination of the blood group properties of bones subjected to the decay process

In this article, a case of examining an incomplete human skeleton found in a forest is presented. Based on the assessment of posttraumatic lesions in the skull bones, the cause of death of a man who had died 14 years prior to the examination was determined with high probability to be due to a lightning strike. Moreover, the rare pathological lesions within the skeleton, such as a healed fracture of the humerus and rheumatoid malformations within the hand, in reference to preserved medical records, have also allowed to identify the deceased. Most noteworthy points in this case are, however, initially difficult to comprehend, posttraumatic lesions within the bones of the skull such as carbonization and fracture of the vertex. Their origin can be explained by a lightning strike as the most probable cause of death. Thus, the presented case demonstrates probable cause of death and identity can be established many years after death, based on skeletal remains.

Lightning Strike as Probable Cause of Death and Determining Identity Based on the Examination of Skeletal Remains

In this paper the concentration of glutamate in the hemispheres of the brain, the cerebellum and the brain stems of rats exposed to sensory stimulation before death and of control rats are presented. Statistically significant differences in the concentration of this neurotransmitter were found in the hemispheres of the brain in the cases of stress lasting 10 min and 1 min and in the cerebellum after a stress of 10 min. This suggests that it may be possible to diagnose the post-mortem state of emotional tension related to sensoric aversive input which takes place directly before death.

The concentration of glutamate in cerebral tissue as a factor for the assessment of the emotional state before death. A preliminary report.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC), as a part of the ’limbic circuit’, plays a fundamental role in emotional and cognitive processes (Lane et al., 1997; Maguire et al., 1998). This has been shown both in experimental animal models and in humans, using modem imaging techniques (Lane et al., 1997; Maguire et al., 1998; Middleton & Strick, 1997). Numerous excitatory amino acids (EAA) neurons are present in PFC, and glutamate plays a key role in excitatory neurotransmission in the central nervous system (McDonald, 1996). Nitric oxide (NO) plays a significant, indirect role in the stimulation of glutamate receptors, particularly the ionotropic (iGluR) and metabotropic (mGluR) glutamate receptor types. The stimulation of both types of glutamate receptors increases after the generation of NO (Gage et al, 1997; Kendrick et al., 1997), indicating that NO may act as a modulator of glutamatergic neurotransmission. Both glutamate and the activity of the enzyme NO-synthase (NOS) respond to noxious, stressful environmental influences. An increased level of

/pdf/constitutive-nitric-oxide-synthase-activity-in-the-27jrhrr90h.pdf

Constitutive Nitric Oxide Synthase Activity in the Prefrontal Cortex of Rats as an Index of Emotional State Before Death

A systematic two-stage study was conducted in pigs to verify the models of postmortem body temperature decrease currently employed in forensic medicine. During the investigations, temperature recordings were performed in four body sites (eyeballs, orbit soft tissues, muscles and rectums). The results of the study support the possible use of the eyeball and also the orbit soft tissues as temperature measuring sites at the early phase after death; they have narrowed the significance of rectum temperature measurements to the late stage of postmortem body temperature decrease, shown insignificant correlations between the body weight and the temperature decrease rate constant and illustrated the functional increase of the time of death estimation error as the body cools, expressed in the distinct tendency to overestimate the calculated time of death as compared to the actual one. In the second stage of the experiment, a lack of a plateau phase was demonstrated, at least from 30 min post mortem. It was also found that in the very early post mortem period, the kinetics of cooling of all the body sites studied was better described by the two-exponential model than the single exponential one. The study also showed that the weak airflow present in the experimental conditions did not practically affect the course of cooling of the investigated body sites. Eyeball temperature measurements with an infra-red laser thermometer performed during the experiment proved to be of no use for determination of the time of death. The experiments allowed for defining the so far unreported value of physiological temperature of pig eyeball as 38 degrees C.

Roman Hauser

Papers

Determination of the blood group properties of bones subjected to the decay process

Lightning Strike as Probable Cause of Death and Determining Identity Based on the Examination of Skeletal Remains

The concentration of glutamate in cerebral tissue as a factor for the assessment of the emotional state before death. A preliminary report.

Constitutive Nitric Oxide Synthase Activity in the Prefrontal Cortex of Rats as an Index of Emotional State Before Death

Estimation of the time of death based on the measurements of the eye temperature in comparison with other body sites