Genes may contain a living record of your life — or, the end of your life. In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications, scientists describe a number of genes that change the way they're expressed after death.
Why it matters: In the future, it's possible the patterns these scientists found could be used to precisely determine someone's time of death.
What's new: Scientists had already identified a number of genes that are turned on at the moment of death. In the new study, researchers:
What they found: The algorithm could successfully approximate time of death within about 9 minutes. However, it was most accurate within the first few hours after death.
Yes, but conditions in the lab might not be as ideal as conditions at a crime scene. It's likely that if this technique is used, it will be in conjunction with other traditional ways for estimating time of death.
