In other words, you might be dead, but your body is more alive than ever.

Forensic scientists are now trying to harness this “necrobiome”. They believe the bugs living upon and within you could harbour vital clues about the circumstances of your demise, and how long you’ve been dead for. And it’s not just the dead that may reveal their secrets through their bugs: microbial fingerprints might also be used in rape or sexual assault cases, to provide police with vital leads about the identity of the assailant.

Unique bacteria

Though you might consider yourself a single entity, you are in fact comprised of billions of living organisms. Some of them will be the same as those carried by other people, but many of them will be unique to you; a montage of the places you’ve been, the people you’ve touched, the foods you’ve eaten – not to mention your unique physiological make-up which some bugs will find more habitable than others.

One of the first hints that these bacterial hitchhikers might be useful to forensic scientists came in 2010, when Rob Knight and his colleagues at the University of Boulder in Colorado discovered that unique bacterial fingerprints could be recovered from people’s computer keyboards.

In the five years since, interest in these microbes has flourished, thanks to a growing appreciation of their diversity – and the development of rapid DNA sequencing techniques to study them.