Journal
ELIFE
Volume 2, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.01104
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Funding
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Education Researchers Grant
- National Institutes of Justice [2011-DN-BX-K533]
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
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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.
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