What is it about?
Heart disease is a common cause of sudden death, but the chemical changes occurring within the heart are not always fully understood. Metabolomics studies the small molecules involved in processes such as energy production and tissue metabolism. We tested whether a commercially available metabolomics kit could be used to analyse heart tissue collected during forensic autopsies. The study included samples from people with ischaemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or traumatic causes of death.
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Why is it important?
Most of the metabolites targeted by the kit could be measured at usable levels in postmortem heart tissue. However, some fell outside the measurement range, and the method did not identify clear differences between the study groups. The main take-home message is therefore that commercial metabolomics kits can be applied to postmortem cardiac tissue, but further tissue-specific optimization and validation are needed.
Perspectives
Postmortem tissue provides a unique opportunity to study disease-related changes directly within organs that are difficult or impossible to sample from living people. With further methodological development, metabolomics of autopsy tissue could improve our understanding of conditions such as ischaemia and diabetes and support future research into cardiac deaths that remain difficult to explain.
Oscar Emil Puntervold
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This page is a summary of: Targeted metabolomics of postmortem human cardiac tissue using the Biocrates MxP Quant 500 kit, PLOS One, August 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0356269.
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