Postmortem Internal Gas Reservoir Monitoring Using GC×GC-HRTOF-MS

Abstract

Forensic investigations often require postmortem examination of a body. However, the collection of evidence during autopsy is often destructive, meaning that the body can no longer be examined in its original state. In order to obtain an internal image of the body, whole body postmortem computed tomography (PMCT) has proven to be a valuable non-destructive tool and is currently used in medicolegal centers. PMCT can also be used to visually locate gas reservoirs inside a cadaver, which upon analysis can provide useful information regarding very volatile compounds that are produced after death. However, the non-targeted profiling of all potential volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in these reservoirs has never been attempted. The aim of this study was to investigate the VOC profile of these reservoirs and to evaluate potential uses of such information to document circumstances surrounding death, cause of death and body taphonomy. Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to time-of-flight high-resolution mass spectrometry (GC×GC-HRTOF-MS) was used for VOC measurements. This study demonstrated that the chemical composition of VOCs within the gas reservoirs differed between locations within a single body but also between individuals. In the future, this work could be expanded to investigate a novel, non-destructive cadaver screening approach prior to full autopsy procedures.

Fingerprinting Glues Using HS‐SPME GC×GC–HRTOFMS: a New Powerful Method Allows Tracking Glues Back in Time

“…; Stefanuto et al . ). The connection between the two columns was made using a SilTite μ‐union (Trajan Scientific and Medical®, Australia).…”

“…The first dimension ( 1 D) column was an Rxi-624Sil MS (30 m × 0.25 mm i.d., 1.40 μm d f ) and the second dimension ( 2 D) column was a Stabilwax (Restek® Corporation) (2 m × 0.25 mm i.d., 0.50 μm d f ). This column set has been successfully applied to complex volatile mixtures (Forbes et al 2014;Perrault et al 2015aPerrault et al ,b, 2016Armstrong et al 2016;Nizio et al 2016;Stefanuto et al 2016). The connection between the two columns was made using a SilTite μ-union (Trajan Scientific and Medical®, Australia).…”

Characterization of hafting adhesives using comprehensive two‐dimensional gas chromatography coupled to time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry

“…The feature template was then applied to the centroided samples to generate peak data that was exported to Microsoft ® Excel. Fisher Ratios (FR) were calculated for each compound and compared against a critical F value (F crit ) . The F crit value for this study was 2.76, which was determined using α = 0.05 and with samples grouped by resin category.…”

The Blossoming of Technology for the Analysis of Complex Aroma Bouquets—A Review on Flavour and Odorant Multidimensional and Comprehensive Gas Chromatography Applications

“…This issue is especially interesting to aid the training of detection dogs, which are usually exposed to human scents to track pieces of evidence in crime scenes or rescue missions [144,145]. Studies have been conducted with different types of odour samples, such as human hands [146,147], blood [145,148,149], decomposition odour chemical mixtures [150], decomposition soil and adipocere from the death scene [151], human and animal cadavers [152,153,154,155,156,157,158,159,160,161], etc. GC×GC-TOFMS analysis was the most applied technique and low/mid polarity stationary phases preferred as 1 D, while for 2 D, the stationary phase is commonly polyethyleneglycol (wax).…”

“…Focant and coworkers applied GC×GC-TOFMS to analyse odour volatiles for forensic applications, covering cadavers, blood, environmental pollutants, chemical odour products and explosives [149,154,155,156,157,158,159,160,161,162,163,164]. They evaluated the composition of some commercial chemical mixtures of odorants used in the training of cadaveric detection dogs, to mimic the human decomposition smell.…”