After Death, Hundreds of Genes Spring Back to Life

Two surprising studies reveal new information about what genes do after death. Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: You think your body stops after death, but up to two days later certain genes may turn on and start doing stuff for another two days before they give up the ghost. We are all zombies for up to four days after death.
Gizmodo reports that in fact "hundreds" of genes apparently spring back to life. "[P]revious work on human cadavers demonstrated that some genes remain active after death, but we had no idea as to the extent of this strange phenomenon."

Comments

Re:Its simple

[quantaman]

A large portion of our (and virtually all other life) is partially composed of virus-inserted code.

To a virus, life isn't really a thing to begin with, only DNA interactions, with rare opportunities to copy.

From that perspective, death of the host body just means it's bacteria party time, and even if 99% of organelles used to copy are kaput, almost all viruses are bacteria-predators anyway. So, hiding away in human DNA for a few hundred generations or whatever is just a distraction from getting to the (ambiguous) goal of a bacteria to infect.

[...]

Niches for DNA code are massively multidimensional, and even though the possibility space for success is outrageously sparse, the life that lives in the outer reaches of possiblity doesn't have be intelligent to know it's a bad idea, and so spreads where we can't imagine. Things like life that only has the chance to reproduce every few hundred years (using another life form's mechanisms to keep their DNA active in the meantime), or has to jump between 3 species in order to continue a full reproduction cycle.

I'm not sure this story holds up. The moment a virus gene is inserted into our genome its reproductive cycle becomes tied to ours. Even if some virus DNA could escape our cells and infect bacteria post-mortem they'd just become ordinary viruses.

The only way for genes to retain function is for that function to be subject to natural selection. But as long as those virus genes are trapped in a human DNA strand the only way for them to propagate is through people, and the moment they escaped they'd be tied to that new organism. There's nothing in human reproduction that ensures that transplanted virus strands stay functional viruses.

A gene going through a multi-species reproductive cycle sounds interesting, but I'm really skeptical it's happening. At least in humans that cross-species jump is just too difficult.