Forensic scientists looking for the exact time of death of a human corpse may have just gotten a new, powerful tool: the human body's own "microbial clock."
The human body is home to about 100 trillion microbes. This so-called "microbial clock" is essentially the succession of bacterial changes that the decaying body goes through postmortem.
“While establishing time of death is a crucial piece of information for investigators in cases that involve bodies, existing techniques are not always reliable,” said Jessica Metcalf, postdoctoral researcher at University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute and one of the authors of the study. “Our results provide a detailed understanding of the bacterial changes that occur as mouse corpses decompose, and we believe this method has the potential to be a complementary forensic tool for estimating time of death."
“At each time point that we sampled, we saw similar microbiome patterns on the individual mice and similar biochemical changes in the grave soil,” said Laura Parfrey, a former CU-Boulder postdoctoral fellow and now a faculty member at the University of British Columbia who is a microbial and eukaryotic expert in a statement about the new study published at eLIFE.
