Changes in Gene Activity May One Day Reveal the Time of Death for Crime Victims

Isabella Dibbini

Mr. Ippolito

AP Biology

14 February 2018

Pennisi, Elizabeth. “Changes in Gene Activity May One Day Reveal the Time of Death for Crime Victims.” Sciencemag, 13 Feb. 2018, www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/changes-gene-activity-may-one-day-reveal-time-death-crime-victims.

The article “Changes in Gene Activity May One Day Reveal the Time of Death for Crime Victims” by Elizabeth Pennisi discusses how in the future, it may be possible to determine the time of death solely based on the changes in the victim’s genes. Recently, computational biologists have taken the first steps toward predicting the death of a person based on observing their gene activity after death. Computational biologist Roderic Guigó has been measuring gene activity in tissues from hundreds of people, both living and dead. Through his studies, his goal was to determine how gene activity changes as the time to preservation is extended. Guigó and his colleagues looked at thousands of samples of tissues, each of which included data on the time between the death of the donor and the preservation of the sample. Guigó reflects on his experiment when he states “The response to the death of the organism is quite tissue specific.” For example, there was very little change over time in the brain’s gene activity. However, more than 600 muscle genes either quickly increased or decreased activity after the loss of life. He furthered his studies by developing a software that “learned” the patterns of 399 people. In addition, they tested how well the machine software predicted the time of death of 129 other people. He and his colleagues came to a certain conclusion: “The software discovered, for example, that in blood, decreased activity of genes involved in DNA production, immune response, and metabolism—but an increase in those involved with stress responses—signaled the person had died about 6 hours before preservation.” Therefore, by analyzing the genes with the help of this particular software, Guigó and his team were able to provide a time frame in which they believe the individual had died.  

Millions of people die each day from various causes. In the future, studying gene activity could ultimately help scientists pinpoint the exact time of death. By developing new softwares, each day we are getting closer to determining this. This discovery of the change in gene activity is just the beginning of new discoveries. By conducting these experiments now, it can only benefit our society in the future.

Throughout this article, the author makes statements and supports them with concrete evidence. In addition, the structure of this article is well planned out. The author begins by introducing his main argument and then goes into depth about the tests that Guigó and his team did, to further this idea. While this article was well written, there are a few things that the author could have done to make their story more compelling. One suggestion that can be made to improve this article would be to incorporate additional plans on how scientists would further this study. Overall, this article was interesting and very well written.