Over the last several years there has been increasing recognition of the importance of establishing a strong basic science foundation in forensics. With the development, reliability and increasingly widespread use of high-throughput sequencing technologies, the forensic sciences are poised to harness ‘-omics’ technology to bridge basic science with medicolegal applications and applied microbiology.
Many studies have demonstrated the ability to detect and identify host-associated microbial communities of living humans, those of non-living humans (e.g. cadavers) and environmental microbial communities in forensics (e.g. as trace evidence or time of death estimates). These communities have been described as post-mortem microbial communities, the post-mortem microbiome, the carrion microbiome, along with several other terms and descriptions. This article uses human post-mortem microbiome (HPMM) to describe this community and argues that the characterization and assessment of intra-individual variation of the HPMM shows considerable promise for applications in the forensic sciences.