On March 23, 2021, an online article was published by Scientific Reports which highlights a breakthrough discovery in the fields of science and medicine – “zombie genes.” This clever nickname has been given to genes in the human brain that become more active postmortem.
New research conducted at the University of Chicago has recently uncovered that some genes in human brain tissue become even more active after death. Specifically, a type of inflammatory cell, known as glial cells, were observed to grow hours after the brain died.
“That glial cells enlarge after death isn’t too surprising given that they are inflammatory and their job is to clean things up after brain injuries like oxygen deprivation or stroke,” said Dr. Jeffrey Loeb, the John S. Garvin Professor and Head of Neurology and Rehabilitation at the UIC College of Medicine and corresponding author on the paper.
During brain surgeries, some brain tissue can be set aside for research purposes as long as the owner consents. This typically occurs when a patient dies and had previously agreed to have their tissue used for research. Also, tissue can be removed during other operations when its removal can help prevent health issues—such as during surgeries that treat epilepsy.
Loeb and his research team would then examine the expression of all genes in the tissue at intervals up to 24 hours. To mimic a postmortem environment, the tissues were kept at room temperature.
During this time, the team discovered that “about 80% of the genes analyzed remained relatively stable for 24 hours—their expression didn’t change much.” Another group of genes that are present in neurons “rapidly degraded in the hours after death.” Finally, the remaining “zombie genes”, or glial cells, actually became more active as the genes found in neurons simultaneously decreased in their activity. Loeb’s research also showed that “the pattern of post-mortem changes peaked at about 12 hours.”
Loeb notes that “researchers need to take into account these genetic and cellular changes, and reduce the post-mortem interval as much as possible to reduce the magnitude of these changes,” and that “we now know which genes and cell types are stable, which degrade, and which increase over time so that results from postmortem brain studies can be better understood.”
While this is a very interesting, albeit creepy, discovery, there are actually some very important applications these conclusions can have within the scientific community. For instance, Loeb and his research team observed gene expression patterns that “didn’t match any of the published reports of postmortem brain gene expression from people without neurological disorders or from people with a wide variety of neurological disorders, ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s.” In other words, what scientists thought they knew about the brains and gene expression of people with various neurological disorders is now being challenged.
Further research is needed to learn more about this topic and to understand the results of Loeb’s work even more. The potential for this knowledge to help those with autism, Alzheimer’s, Schizophrenia, and many other disorders is astronomical and worth the attention of scientists and researchers around the world.
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