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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.'"
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.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I can now announce, after years of research and thousands of mice, that it is possible to differentiate between them having being killed by a blender, a hacksaw or just plain deep-frying. I am now working on staple guns, sulfuric acid and gamma rays but as yet do not have a statistically significant sample because the pet shop has run out of mice and I have had to switch to fluffy bunnies.
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.