TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zajac, Barbara Karolina
A1  - Amendt, Jens
A1  - Verhoff, Marcel A.
A1  - Zehner, Richard
T1  - Dating pupae of the blow fly calliphora vicina Robineau–Desvoidy 1830 (Diptera: Calliphoridae) for post mortem interval—estimation : validation of molecular age markers
T2  - Genes
N2  - Determining the age of juvenile blow flies is one of the key tasks of forensic entomology when providing evidence for the minimum post mortem interval. While the age determination of blow fly larvae is well established using morphological parameters, the current study focuses on molecular methods for estimating the age of blow flies during the metamorphosis in the pupal stage, which lasts about half the total juvenile development. It has already been demonstrated in several studies that the intraspecific variance in expression of so far used genes in blow flies is often too high to assign a certain expression level to a distinct age, leading to an inaccurate prediction. To overcome this problem, we previously identified new markers, which show a very sharp age dependent expression course during pupal development of the forensically-important blow fly Calliphora vicina Robineau–Desvoidy 1830 (Diptera: Calliphoridae) by analyzing massive parallel sequencing (MPS) generated transcriptome data. We initially designed and validated two quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assays for each of 15 defined pupal ages representing a daily progress during the total pupal development if grown at 17 °C. We also investigated whether the performance of these assays is affected by the ambient temperature, when rearing pupae of C. vicina at three different constant temperatures—namely 17 °C, 20 °C and 25 °C. A temperature dependency of the performance could not be observed, except for one marker. Hence, for each of the defined development landmarks, we can present gene expression profiles of one to two markers defining the mentioned progress in development.
KW  - forensic entomology
KW  - digital age determination
KW  - qPCR
KW  - transcriptome analysis
KW  - metamorphosis
KW  - forensics
KW  - blow fly
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45866
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-458668
SN  - 2073-4425
N1  - This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
VL  - 9
IS  - 3, Art. 153
SP  - 1
EP  - 19
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -