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Review
. 2016 Aug;54(8):1964-74.
doi: 10.1128/JCM.00046-16. Epub 2016 Feb 24.

Expansion of Microbial Forensics

Sarah E Schmedes  1 , Antti Sajantila  2 , Bruce Budowle  3
Affiliations
Review

Expansion of Microbial Forensics

Sarah E Schmedes et al. J Clin Microbiol. 2016 Aug.

Abstract

Microbial forensics has been defined as the discipline of applying scientific methods to the analysis of evidence related to bioterrorism, biocrimes, hoaxes, or the accidental release of a biological agent or toxin for attribution purposes. Over the past 15 years, technology, particularly massively parallel sequencing, and bioinformatics advances now allow the characterization of microorganisms for a variety of human forensic applications, such as human identification, body fluid characterization, postmortem interval estimation, and biocrimes involving tracking of infectious agents. Thus, microbial forensics should be more broadly described as the discipline of applying scientific methods to the analysis of microbial evidence in criminal and civil cases for investigative purposes.

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Figures

FIG 1
FIG 1
Diagram of expanded human investigative and forensic testing to include human genome and human microbiome characterization.
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