Human Postmortem Microbiome

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Despite the known importance of the human microbiome and its function in health, there is tremendous potential for expanding this knowledge through the utilization of a ubiquitous, but often overlooked resource – the human postmortem microbiome.

While few studies have characterized the dynamics of the postmortem human microbiota, little is known about postmortem microbiology of humans, particularly the microbial structure of microflora residing within the human ecosystem, from real-world death investigation. To our knowledge, none to-date have provided a large-scale cross-sectional survey of the microbial community composition and predicted function from samples taken in routine death investigation. Nor, has there been a robust dataset to test the potential utility of the postmortem microbiome as a tool for assessing health conditions in living populations.

Our collaboration (Dr. M. Eric Benbow, Dr. Heather Jordan, and Dr. Carl J. Schmidt) has led to an extensive database of microbial samples with a focus on a major metropolitan urban city. Microbial taxonomic profiles from routine death investigation cases have been generated from targeted amplicon sequencing (16s rRNA). Additionally, predicted functional profiles have also been determined with the Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States (PICRUSt) pipeline to estimate community gene content based on available sequenced amplicons.

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The goal of this project is to provide a robust dataset of postmortem microbial communities. In the future, these data will advance death investigation by identifying specific microbial taxa or signatures of importance for application in forensic science.

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For more details about this project, please click here!

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This project was funded in part, by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice through Grant 2014-DN-BX-K008. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.