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takyon writes:

A team of scientists have found that changes in gene activity in human tissue after death could be used to determine the time of death:

Computational biologist Roderic Guigó didn't start out as a death detective. Guigó, of the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, is also part of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.1262110] [DX]) pilot, a large consortium of geneticists and molecular biologists that has been measuring gene activity in tissues from hundreds of people, living and dead. The goal is to determine how the body makes different cells do different things, given that they all carry the same DNA instructions. It also seeks to determine how slight variations in DNA from person to person change what cells do. Other researchers have already shown that some genes stay active up to 4 days after death. Guigó wanted to find out how gene activity changes as the time to preservation is extended.

He and his colleagues looked at 9000 samples of 36 tissues, "an impressive data set," Tagkopoulos says. Each sample included data on the time between the death of the donor and the preservation of the sample. Each tissue has a distinct pattern of increases and decreases in gene activity over time, and these changes can be used to backtrack to the time of death [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02772-x] [DX], the team reports today in Nature Communications.

Also at BBC.

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