FORENSIC SOFTWARE WITH A GENOMIC LIBRARY TO DIAGNOSE THE CAUSE OF INTOXICATION IN PRACTICAL CLASSES

J. del Pino1, P. Moyano1, F.J. Mourin1, M.T. Frejo1, M.J. Diaz1, J. Garcia2, M. Lobo1, M.A. Capo1, M.J. Anadon1

1Complutense University of Madrid (SPAIN)
2Alfonso X University (SPAIN)
The establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is trying to change the modalities of learning from lecture to other alternatives that are based on new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The use of ICT in education can easily develop key aspects of the EHEA, such as transparency and quality in learning, global assessment of student work and finally and perhaps most important, student autonomy.

Many times the systematic analysis of toxic substances in corpses by the forensic examiners to determine possible cases of poisoning has problem of false positive and negative for many substances. Moreover, due to the fact these analyses are expensive, the number of substances that are analyzed is limited. Therefore, powerful tools that help the forensic examiner to make a perfect discrimination between substances and reduce the cost of the analysis are needed. To improve the way of forensic analysis, we have developed a program for the toxicological forensic analysis in order to improve practice teaching of students in addition to serving as support in subsequent forensic practice to avoid the incorrect diagnose.

The software has a comprehensive database that includes a library of gene expression for more relevant toxic substances. The toxic substances produce for each species and tissue a repression/ induction of different genes and this patron of expression is unique and configures a fingerprint of the toxic substance. With this idea, we built a software that let us measure in the corpses the gene expression induced by the toxic and compare it with the library of the software to elucidate the toxic compound. Consequently, no matter that the forensic examiner does not know a particular poison, as the software will announce the possible poison not considered.

The aim of this project is to provide tools for the differential toxicological forensic analysis.

At the end of the program the student is able to:
- Understand the mechanism of analytic differential diagnostic
- Use the methodology to differentiate the genomic expression from different intoxications.
- Improve the skills of selecting the most relevant complementary test for forensic analysis, with cost-effectiveness criteria.
keywords: ehea, differential toxicological forensic analysis, genomic library.