The findings from the latest study could influence the way how human organ transplants are approached and how we define death, notes New Scientist. “It might be possible for cells to revert back to life or take some interesting path to differentiating into something new or lose differentiation altogether, such as in cancer”. Of the genes that turned on immediately after death, many were associated with cancer, and some were – and this is pretty weird – genes associated with fetal development, which normally shut off once a baby is born. Noble told Science magazine on Wednesday. They measured this by looking at the level of mRNA – strands of “messenger data needed to turn active genes into proteins – still floating around in the cells”. These zombie genes can’t bring a person back to life, but this discovery has serious implications for forensics and organ donor recipients.
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The authors wrote of the study: “We initially thought that sudden death of a vertebrate would be analogous to a auto driving down a highway and running out of gas”. University of Washington biologist Peter Noble and his pals have shown that certain parts of the body remain active even after the rest of it has come to a grinding halt.
“Since the postmortem upregulation of genes occurred in both the zebrafish and the mouse in our study, it is reasonable to suggest that other multicellular eukaryotes [forms of life] will display a similar phenomenon”. “The headline of this study is that we can probably get a lot of information about life by studying death”, Noble says. Some of them activated after death.
Many of these undead genes become active in times of emergency triggering inflammation, firing up the immune system, and counteracting stress. The researchers used a novel method which they developed to see “what happens when we die”. Noble suspects that this gene becomes active because the cellular environment in dead bodies must somehow resemble those found in embryos. The team found more than 1,000 active genes. The team’s approach for measuring gene activity could be “used as a diagnostic tool for predicting the quality of a transplant”.
It could also help pathologists narrow down a time of death more precisely – possibly within minutes of the occurrence.
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As noted, these two papers have yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal, and the genetic evaluations were not performed on human cadavers.
