The Future of Routine Omics-based PMI Assays: An Interview with Noemi Procopio, Part IV

As part of “From Sample to Verdict,” LCGC International sat down with Noemi Procopio, who is the Principal Investigator of the "Forens-OMICS" team and a Senior Research Fellow in Forensic Science at the University of Central Lancashire to talk about her team’s work (1,2). In Part III of our conversation with Procopio, she discussed how her team analyzes bone samples for post-mortem interval (PMI) estimation. In the final part of our conversation, Procopio discusses what a routine omics-based PMI assay could look like in the future.

Will Wetzel: What steps are being taken to translate your research into practical tools for forensic labs, and what would a routine omics-based PMI assay look like in the future?

Noemi Procopio: The plan is to move from untargeted studies to targeted studies, and the way to do so is to identify a set of proteins, metabolites, bacteria that are informative at different time points. The idea would be to go targeted and to be able to do absolute quantifications of all these molecules using assays. That would be the dream, like having a kit that can be used by practitioners one day, not necessarily people being experts in using proteomics methods or metabolomics methods. Imagine something like a safe for proteins or a targeted assay for metabolites where you can have a tiny panel of different metabolites that can be analyzed like for anti-doping analysis.

However, we're still a bit far in the sense that we need to identify the right biomarkers, and to do so, we need to have a new set of independent bones that we can test with the results that we obtain with our set of bones and seeing if they will be applicable in different contexts or coming from different HDFS. On the longer time scale, that will be the dream having something easy, cheap, and simple. However, right now, a lot of work still needs to be done.

References

1. Procopio, N. Forens-omics: How a Multi-omic Approach Can Reveal the Mysteries of the Postmortem Interval. The Pathologist 2024, 6. Available at: https://thepathologist.com/issues/2024/articles/nov/forens-omics/ (accessed 2025-07-24)
2. Procopio, N.; Bonicelli, A. From Flesh to Bones: Multi-omics Approaches in Forensic Science. Prot. Sys. Biol. 2024, 24 (12–13), 2200355. DOI: 10.1002/pmic.202200335