Telltale microbes reveal how long an animal has been dead and could one day aid criminal investigations.
Forensic scientists sometimes use insects to gauge a corpse's time of death, but the method's margin of error ranges into weeks. Reasoning that microscopic organisms would make a more accurate clock, Rob Knight of the University of Colorado Boulder and his colleagues used high-throughput sequencing to characterize the microbial communities residing in mouse corpses that had been buried for up to 48 days. The groups of bacteria and microbial eukaryotes changed as the corpses decomposed and eventually ruptured, releasing bacteria from the gut.
The progression in microbial communities provided a clock that reveals the time of death with an error of just over 3 days. More work is needed to assess how well this works with human corpses and to study the effects of temperature and soil type.
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The microbial corpse clock. Nature 502, 413 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502413c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/502413c
