Even after you’ve been dead for days, little pieces of your body continue to live on. That’s what some prominent ones claim American microbiologists. In particular, the bacteria in your intestine, which normally extract nutrients from your food, take on a completely new function. And that is not as obvious as you might think. But what exactly do they do?
Glenn Haex 02-10-23, 18:30 Last update: 02-10-23, 20:11 Source: The Conversation
When someone dies, a body seems to stop completely. The heart stops pumping, the brain cells die and the skin turns gray. But according to American microbiologists, that is just an appearance. Their research shows that, among other things, the bacteria in your intestines are given a temporary new function.
What exactly do the bacteria do?
“Put simply, the bacteria will rot your body,” writes researcher Jennifer DeBruyn on The Conversation. “You need to know that when you die, your heart stops transporting oxygen-rich blood. Because oxygen no longer goes to your cells, they will die. The bacteria in your intestine can then benefit from this. They can now use this for food, since they no longer ingest food when you eat.”
Something that makes perfect sense, according to Professor DeBruyn: “Your microbes are organisms that want to survive at all costs. So they use your body to keep themselves alive, and even increase their numbers.” In concrete terms, this means that these bacteria work their way through your organs and thus digest you.
And what next?
“There’s still some mystery around that,” DeBruyn says. “First of all you would think they would die off. Your microbes are used to a stable, warm environment, and the soil around a corpse is not. There are major differences in temperature, moisture and nutrients there, and there are also other microbes that are better adapted to the environment. But remarkably, our microbes don’t seem to just disappear. Previous research shows that months or years after a body has decomposed, we can still find traces of those microbes. So it could perfectly be that our microbes are in a kind of dormant state, and ‘wake up’ again when they have found a new host.”
Moreover, American scientists discovered recent also that our microbes sometimes collaborate with native soil microbes. “They help each other to clean up your body completely,” it sounds. So there does seem to be life after death, but it is at a microscopic level.
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2023-10-02 16:30:18
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