After death which of our body's metabolic processes will continue functioning for the longest?
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My first guess would be the metabolic process are going on as long as there is free ATP in the cell. After this, your muscles will become stiff. But, since dead bodies which are exhumed usually show longer hair and longer fingernails than before the funeral, I bet the growth of this is one of the last processes which can take place in human bodies. |
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My answer isn't researched; it is speculative. I interpret metabolic processes as anabolic or catabolic processes. I assert that only anaerobic processes can continue for a long time after vegetative death (the epithelia could house a counter-example of a post-mortem process, but I can't think of one), and I speculate that only catabolic processes are likely to have sufficient pools of reactants to continue after death. So we're looking for a catabolic process with a large reactant pool. Therefore I think that the action of digestive proteases will continue for the longest time, because these enzymes are very stable and could have a lot of substrate around (including, at a very slow rate, cleaving each other.) The neutralization of stomach pH would inactivate this process...I don't know how long that takes. If something like blood clotting is considered a metabolic process, then probably that continues the longest. The binding of CO2 by hemaglobin is probably faster than blood clotting. Again, I don't really consider those processes to be metabolic. |
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