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When I die, what happens to my microbiome?

Luce Gilmore
Cambridge, UK

The fate of one’s post-mortem microbiome is chaotic and messy. Most of the microbiome resides in the gut, and the gut is quite anoxic, so one’s ceasing to breathe isn’t instantly calamitous. Of course, there is no more food coming in, but the body’s containment machinery, built into the gut wall, rapidly fails. Suddenly, the food upon which the gut microbiome subsists becomes the gut itself.

There is no way to put this delicately. The gut microbiome dissolves the gut wall and goes on to consume the corpse.…