ISTOCK, SOUTH_AGENCYResearchers have identified specific gene activity patterns that appear in human tissue shortly after death. These findings, reported today (February 13) in Nature Communications, could one day help crime-scene investigators pinpoint time of death and improve forensic analysis.
By examining gene activity in 36 different postmortem human tissues, Roderic Guigó, a computational biologist at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, and his colleagues found patterns in the way gene expression increased or decreased with time.
“The response to the death of the organism is quite tissue specific,” Guigó tells Science. He explains that muscle genes had swift boosts or drops in activity, while gene activity in the brain and spleen didn’t change much with time. Guigó and his colleagues also observed that the majority of the changes occurred 7 to 14 hours after death. After that, the transcriptome “seems to stabilize,” the researchers write in the paper.
The findings make sense, Ilias Tagkopoulos, a computer scientist at the University of California, Davis ...
