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                            Funding & Awards
 Extending the Microbial Forensic Toolkit Through Whole Genome Sequencing and Statistical Phylogenomics
Award Information
Awardee
              Baylor College of Medicine
Award #
              2011-DN-BX-K534
Funding Category
              Competitive
Location
                    Houston, TX
Congressional District
              9
Status
              Closed
Funding First Awarded
              2011
Total funding (to date)
              $581,213
Original Solicitation
              NIJ FY 11 Basic Scientific Research to Support Forensic Science for Criminal Justice Purposes
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2011, $581,213)
Microbes have also developed a number of elaborate mechanisms for generating natural genetic diversity, including high mutation and recombination rates as well as the horizontal transfer of gene(s). One major goal of microbial forensics is to use this genetic diversity to identify the source of a pathogen used to commit a crime. While phylogenetic analysis of nucleotide variation within a small number of genes has been used in past forensic studies to assess relationships among pathogens, a large fraction of those genomes remain uncharacterized, ignoring useful information contained in the presence or absence of different genes and other structural variation.  Recent advances in next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and phylogenetic analysis of complete genomes (phylogenomics) have the potential to significantly alter the technological approaches used in characterizing case samples. This proposal seeks to expand our existing scientific work on HIV forensic studies by developing a robust "pathogen toolkit" for source identification across a range of biological agents.  ca/ncf



  
Grant-Funded Publications
        
                      EmpPrior: Using Outside Empirical Data To Inform Branch-Length Priors for Bayesian Phylogenetics
                  Deflating Trees: Improving Bayesian Branch-Length Estimates using Informed Priors
                  Progress Towards Developing The 'Pathogen Toolkit'

  
Date Created: September 11, 2011
    
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                      Policing Leadership and Accountability: Harnessing Big Data and Causal Inference for Evaluating Police Reform Practices
                  Quantifying the accuracy of low quality DNA sample analysis from genotyping to genealogical searching and integration as a bioinformatic pipeline
                  Recovery and Analysis of Less Volatile Components for the Identification of Ignitable Liquid Residues in Fire Debris - Continuation of current NIJ-funded project (2020-DQ-BX-0003)
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