Narcotic and psychotropic
substances are natural, synthetic, or
semisynthetic compounds that are present in both solid and liquid
illicit products. The alterations effects on the central nervous system
related to their use can be psycholeptic, psychoanaleptic, or psychodiseptic
and are able to generate tolerance, addiction, or dependence phenomena,
creating social and public order problems. In this scenario, the analytical
evaluations that aim to determine these analytes in seized nonbiological
samples, and which assume the character of judicial evidence, must
meet high analytical requirements of reliability, transparency, and
procedures uniformity at a national level. For the first time in the
literature, the herein validated method is able to provide the simultaneous
quantitative determination of 37 of the most common narcotic substances
as well as the most commonly used excipients/adulterants found in
seized illicit material. Additionally, the validated method can process
both solid and liquid samples maintaining the precision and trueness
levels (intraday and interday) in accordance with the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency international guidelines
(<14.31 and <13.41%, respectively). Furthermore, it provides
a simple and fast procedure for sample preparation using the
dilute and shoot
approach, exploiting the sensitivity and
selectivity of the LC-MS/MS instrument configuration used and the
signal acquisition in multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode (both
positive and negative polarization modes).
Background
Since the beginning of the worldwide spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 to date, important knowledge has been obtained about the virus behavior in living subjects and on inanimate surfaces; however, there is still a lack of data on virus persistency on dead bodies and the risk of contagion from cadavers.
Case presentation
The present case shows the persistency of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 viral genome in nasopharyngeal swabs performed on a drowned Caucasian man, aged 41 years old, who was completely asymptomatic when he was alive, up to 41 days after death. Specific real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (TaqMan 2019-nCoV Assay Kit v2; Thermo Fisher Scientific, Italy and Realquality RQ-SARS-CoV-2, AB Analytical) was used to evaluate the swabs.
Conclusions
This data reflect the importance of postmortem swabs in all autopsy cases, and not only in potential severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2-related death, and also highlight the necessity to evaluate virus positivity a long time after the moment of death, even if a low initial viral load was assessed.
In recent years, major attention has been focused on microextraction procedures that allow high recovery of target analytes, regardless of the complexity of the sample matrices. The most used techniques included liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), solid-phase extraction (SPE), solid-phase microextraction (SPME), dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME), microextraction by packed sorbent (MEPS), and fabric-phase sorptive extraction (FPSE). These techniques manifest a rapid development of sample preparation techniques in different fields, such as biological, environmental, food sciences, natural products, forensic medicine, and toxicology. In the biological and forensic fields, where a wide variety of drugs with different chemical properties are analyzed, the sample preparation is required to make the sample suitable for the instrumental analysis, which often includes gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with mass detectors or tandem mass detectors (MS/MS). In this review, we have focused our attention on the biological and forensic application of these innovative procedures, highlighting the major advantages and results that have been accomplished in laboratory and clinical practice.
Human postmortem skeletal muscles are a unique source of satellite cells for skeletal muscle regenerative studies. Presomite and somite satellite cells obtained by postmortem muscles have been established as populations of human skeletal muscle precursor cells able to proliferate and differentiate in vitro. It is extremely interesting to have access to a large amount of postmortem human skeletal muscle precursor cells, especially from craniofacial as well as limb skeletal muscles in order to evaluate their potential application not only for the fundamental understanding of muscle physiology and diseases but also for drug testing in a challenging 3D-shaping muscles like skeletal muscle microphysiological systems.
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