Unless you are present with a stopwatch in hand, an individual’s exact time of death can often remain a mystery. A new study is helping to solve this problem though, with the discovery of zombie genes, or genes that ‘wake up’ after an organism has died, which could also lead to better regulation in organ transplants.
The experiment’s results were published in the journal BioRxiv. They detail how certain parts of our DNA actually seem to become more active after the time of death.
If you want, imagine a chicken running around with its head cut off: activity increases just when you think it wouldn’t be possible.
It works like this: while we are living, our DNA is continually being read and transcribed by our mRNA. These tell our body how to code our proteins. Essentially, they tell it how to work.
Researchers looked at 36,811 zebrafish genes and 37,368 mouse genes in total in their study. They examined the tissues from the dead organisms by looking at the activity levels in the mRNA. What they found was that some of these compounds do ‘wake up’ after death.
Some mRNA increase their transcription activity in the days after death, sometime within the first 48 ours. And by looking at the transcription activity, and how much is going on, scientists can count backwards and predict the time of death of the organism down to just minutes.
Which is pretty amazing. Presently, forensic analysis can predict the time of death within just hours or days-not nearly as precisely as this postmortem gene activity analysis.
But that’s not all that so-called ‘zombie gene’ analysis is good for. Apart from providing more investigative clues, the greatest medical application of this study could actually be in making organ transplants safer and more successful.
It seems that part of what newly awoken ‘zombie genes’ are doing when they get busy coding for proteins after death, is regulating the body’s susceptibility to developing cancer.
Why? That remains to be seen. It’s almost as if nature knows the organs could be put to use in someone else. They need to stay healthy.
The fact is, right now transplant recipients are three to four times more likely to develop cancer than the general population, states Oxford Journal’s Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
And of those that do develop it, most face a much greater chance of dying from the disease than others.
The statistics are grim enough that Joseph Buell, M.D., of the University of Louisville Jewish Hospital has stated, “Among kidney and heart recipients who have survived at least 3 years after a transplant, cancer is poised to become the leading cause of death over the next 20 years.”
Hopefully these new results can help change this. Perhaps ‘zombie genes’ could help to minimize the development of cancer in recipients by contributing to a better understanding of how and when to harvest organs for transplant.
Sounds like a great chance for zombies to renew their good name and reputation. What an amazing way to give life, instead of take it.
Photo Credit: Romolo Tavani/Shutterstock
