A microbial clock provides an accurate estimate of the postmortem interval in a mouse model system

By J. Metcalf, Laura Wegener Parfrey, Antonio Gonzalez, C. Lauber, Dan Knights, Gail L Ackermann, Gregory Humphrey, Matthew J. Gebert, William W. Van Treuren, Donna berg-Lyons and 6 more. eLife, 2013

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Establishing the time since death is critical in every death investigation, yet existing techniques are susceptible to a range of errors and biases. For example, forensic entomology is widely used to assess the postmortem interval (PMI), but errors can range from days to months. Microbes may provide a novel method for estimating PMI that avoids many of these limitations. Here we show that postmortem microbial community changes are dramatic, measurable, and repeatable in a mouse model system, allowing PMI to be estimated within approximately 3 days over 48 days. Our results provide a detailed understanding of bacterial and microbial eukaryotic ecology within a decomposing corpse system and suggest that microbial community data can be developed into a forensic tool for estimating PMI. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.01104.001

Subfields: Genetics, Insect Science, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8316f82acf3a2a2d575c6f090da1292cd3efee7

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In Genetics

In Insect Science

Rob Knight

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Improved Bacterial 16S rRNA Gene (V4 and V4-5) and Fungal Internal Transcribed Spacer Marker Gene Primers for Microbial Community Surveys (2015, background): “The fifth set of samples included in this study is part of a mouse decomposition study (13) available from EBI under accession number ERP003929.”