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Masters Thesis

Investigations on the UV-VIS absorption spectrum of hemoglobin in postmortem rat blood samples as a method to determine time of death

The purpose of this research was to determine time since death based on the hypsochromic shift of hemoglobin's Soret band. Three experiments were conducted to examine the Soret band shift over time, the degree of inter-subject variation, and the accuracy and precision of the technique. Using different lysing methods on the erythrocytes, blood from six euthanized rats were tested over different time since death intervals using an Implen NanoPhotometer P 300 to obtain an absorption spectrum. Rat blood was collected from multiple rats from the time of death up to 84 hours after death. There was no change detected over time of the Soret band of hemoglobin after death. The results from the six rats were consistent with each other and supported that there was little to no inter-rat variation of the Soret band location. Furthermore, the method was determined to be both accurate and precise between the duplicated results.

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