Whoa!!
Despite what crime dramas might lead us to believe, forensics technologies still aren't perfect. A big hangup of the DNA evidence is that we have the same copy of DNA in every cell, so telling where the tissue samples came from is difficult/impossible.
Sounds like a job for proteomics!
In this cool paper from Sascha Dammeier et al., out of the Kohlbacher lab these researchers investigate using a proteomics approach to show that shotgun proteomics runs can tell you what tissue some evidence comes from. When your Materials and Methods section includes bullets and evidence bags, you've entered into interesting proteomics territory!
To make it even more interesting(!!) they did the proof-of-principle stuff on a cow organs subjected to blunt trama and then(!!!) they participated in a real crime investigation!!!
Okay, get this. A bullet passing through and organ carries enough protein for an Orbitrap XL to get a proteome signature good identify the organ!
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