44. It has been said that people can be judged by the company they keep. New research from Michigan State University (MSU) shows that what is true for the living is also true for the dead. The study, published in the current issue of Nature Scientific Reports, shows that postmortem microbiome—population of micro organisms that move in after death—can provide crucial insights into the public health. Regardless of many factors—sex, ethnicity, or even type of death—the microbiome is consistent and distinct, depending on the number of days after death.
Based on the growing number of partnerships between MSU forensic entomologists and medical examiners, the police and medical communities are beginning to see the value this research can provide. A case in point is the interdisciplinary research happening between MSU and the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office. The partnership initially began to better understand the bugs and microbes present and what they can tell investigators about the recently deceased. Just as the TV show says, the first 48 hours of an investigation are critical. The organisms found on a body can help estimate the time of death.
According to Eric Benbow, MSU forensic entomologist and microbial ecologist and study co-author, the microbial stopwatch, as it has recently been called, is a telling timepiece that can assist us in determining when someone died. It is comparable to a town with a changing population: a company starts up, and an entire new population moves in. In death, that microbial population is different after two days, and it completely turns over again a few days later.
MSU’s kits and the collection protocol are now being regularly used in death investigations. One noteworthy case involves a mother who stored her two dead children in a freezer. The microbial data were the first used to understand how the postmortem microbiome changes in unusual circumstances of death and concealment, in this case when bodies were frozen. The ever-growing dataset is painting a picture of the public health—of the living—including many populations that are underserved and understudied by the medical community.
For the first time, Michigan State University is demonstrating that sampling the postmortem microbiome may have public health surveillance importance like monitoring the diversity and frequency of antibiotic resistant genes from the general population. Additionally, the victim may have died of a drug overdose, but the research also revealed that the microbes can show that the person suffered from a heart disease.
According to the study’s lead author Jennifer Pechal, during the first 48 hours the samples that had been gathered from a predominantly industrial urban population confirmed that microbial biodiversity is a predictor of the host’s health conditions, such as heart disease, when they were living. The researchers have demonstrated that this microbiome could be an effective tool for assessing the health of living populations.
The word “critical” in line 10 could best be replaced by which of the following?