2014/10/31

Michigan Radio October 29, 2014: MSU and Detroit analyze tiny bacteria to investigate murders

It sounds like "CSI" meets "Bones." 

The Wayne County Medical Examiner is sending swab samples from dead bodies to Michigan State University researchers.

They're going to run a new kind of analysis in hopes of determining when someone died, whether they touched a weapon, and possibly even where they've been. 

What they’re looking at are the teeny-tiny things that live on our bodies: microbes.

You can’t see them with the naked eye, but we all have bacteria, fungi, and even tiny worms that live on our bodies and form their own ecosystems.

Those “microbiome communities,” as they’re called, turn out to be kind of like fingerprints.

And since they’re constantly evolving, even after we die, scientists think they could read them like a “microbial clock, to identify how long someone’s been dead,” says Eric Benbow, MSU entomologist and osteopathic medical specialist. more