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Genetic Clues to Cause of Death?
An anonymous reader writes "Nature is reporting that a certain 'telltale genetic fingerprint' may help scientists to more accurately determine a cause of death. From the article: 'Now a team at Nagasaki University has shown that a person's own genes might help to reveal how they met their end. Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation. They dissected skin samples from the animals' necks and compared the activity of a broad spectrum of genes inside the skin cells, by looking at the amount of RNA pumped out by those genes. The researchers found four genes that were more active in the strangled animals than those that had died suddenly.'"
Cue the Monty Python references.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Not even that suprising but I never thought about it. If the oxygen level in the cells decreases that of course has an effect on the creation of rna.
If a creature dies suddenly the total blood flow stops and so the flow of all chemicals instead of just oxygen (and maybe a few others).
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I understand that the researchers are trying to determine if a subject died by "strangulation or other means" , but here's an easy way to tell if a subject died by decapitation or strangulation without having to resort to costly genetic tests. Measure the distance between the head and neck. If d > 0 , the subject was probably decapitated. I guess this test would be useful in determining if the subject was strangulated before decapitated, but how often are the investigators wondering that.
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It would be incredible if we discover that our mind and body records in intricate detail our last moments, and that this information can be obtained / downloaded etc. Perhaps through genetics and/or tapping into the brain in the minutes soon after death? The legal implications would be as controversial as the scientific.
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My computer frequently send out genetic samples to some researcher somewhere in the world, everytime it dies... no one seems to have a clue yet!
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Apart from this being highly unethical there's these points
1) the GENES have nothing to do with it. They're measuring mRNA expression, which is not the same thing. Strangulation does not change your genes dammit.
2) It's a bit bloody obviuous not? Strangulation has known consequences, and we've known for ages that shortage of osygen has an effect on gene expression levels. So in the very specific case thay could have made the distinction. But just observing the body will give you more info in 5 min than the $1000 microarray will give you in two days.
Maybe daddy loved him too much....
"Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation."
Well, if his experiments don't work out, I'm sure Mr. Ikematsu could always make a few surgical alterations to himself and find gainful employment as a dominatrix for small rodents.
...think of the mice!
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It's not that those genes are created during stranglement. They are part of the genetic code anyway.
To put it in computer terms, the genome is the executable, but what they do is to look at the core dump in order to see what code was actually executed. Of course that code which was executed will be in any copy of the executable, but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to use a copy of the executable to find out how it was used on a previous execution, even if you copied the executable while it was executed.
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The researchers found four genes that were more active in the strangled animals than those that had died suddenly.
And guess who strangled the animals those death in order to do this research?
They missed the obvious mistake in this: The "Cause of Death" with these mice is not strangulation or decapitacion, but "bored, cruel scientists with too much time on their hands". Since in both cases the cause of death has been the same, the investigation turned out useless.
For mice you have to use mdb, since gdb is only the gnu debugger.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's why the mice where Anaesthetized first.
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Well, working on mice is fine but what about the human subjects? These days there's a new group of people arguing that if something works on mice, it needn't necessarily work on humans - like mice developing new brain cells when injected with synthetic cannabinoids. I, for once, would be willing to be a guinea-pig if anyone wants to test the effects of pot on humans. Back to the topic, what still needs to be done is to prove the same theory for humans and let the forensics take over from there.
Such a slaughter does not serve science, and hardly deserves being called science. No matter how 'small' the group might be.
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So if he had a V8 engine running at 6000 rpm, he could make nearly $2.9m/hr? Sign me up!
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wow, i have no idea how PETA has not FLIPPED. i have killed a lot of hamsters/mice/rats in my days working in a neuroendocrinology lab and we had to go through hell applying for/making sure our protocols for killing the animals were up to snuff with federal regulation. i wonder how they got permission for the strangulation. plus, it's a rediculous study anyway. what "genes" are they talking about? i assume that they are activated in response to a lack of oxygen because thats what the article stressed. in that case, they could probably just measure lactic acid (lactic acid is the product of an alternative pathway to make ATP when oxygen is not available), degredation products of lactic acid, or ph level in the cytoplasm of the animals cells (ph drops when lactic acid is produced). also, the RNA that they saw an increased transcription of would likeley degrade before any reasonable conclusions could be made. as a last note, if the genes they saw activated were from the pressure of the strangulation, this tells the forensic scientists nothing because the original goal is to determine if "whether someone died by strangulation or suffocation, rather than by some other means," especially in cases where there are no other physical clues. strangulation pressure always leaves a mark.
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Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anaesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation.
This story will be 'ripped from the headlines' on the next episode of 'Law & Order: Small Victims Unit.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I said above that while I don't care much for mice in general, I don't care much for people who carve them up for incredibly little reason, either. It's something you would have to be a bit sick to do, IMO. And the scientific knowledge gained by this experiment is practically worthless.
(That comment was rated troll, btw)
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They are killing mouse. I feel a small disturbance in the force.
(anyone up for any THHTTG quotes?)
What an apposite turn of phrase.
Not after these guys get through with them.
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The test mice were all sound asleep when they met their ends, unlike this mouse , who went out a la Peter Jackson's Denethor.
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But is it any more cruel than the typical use of mice as snake food where they are fed live to a snake? Also undoubtedly would induce as much fear as strangulation would, if not more so since the snake situation is exacerbated by facing a natural predator. Personally, I couldn't do that, but it is a widespread accepted practice that seems not very different from this experiment.
However, it does seem rather pointless, considering how specific the test is and it doesn't reflect how useful this would be in humans. I would think it easy to collect samples from cadavers with well known causes of death and test those. Maybe they need shortly before to compare against?
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I don't think we can fit the entire mouse genome into an Access mbd.
This is not the innovation it seems to be. For most causes of death there are precise enzymatic and cytological evidence (apart from the obvious macroscopic evidence). Tissues include some very specific cell lines which contain a series of isoenzymes specific for that cell line. For instance a cardiac infract increases the levels of creatine-kinase MB isoenzyme, whereas an ictus would not to the same extent. Furthermore, isoenzymes have different half-lives giving furhter insight to the timing of the events that caused illness or death (in some cases detectable even after a year). This is all info we have today and use in both clincal and forensic practise. The experiment described in article (IMO quite misleading) goes a step further by determining the changes in transcription/translation (the article does not specificy) of DNA following specific lesions. In the not so far away future, I would expect an integration of the actual, biochemical and cytological techinques with the genetic investigation proposed in the article.
I dunno, has your PC ever accidentally shot rat blood in your eye?
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