Expansion of microbial forensics

Sarah E. Schmedes, Antti Sajantila, Bruce Budowle

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

66 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1964-1974
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Clinical Microbiology
Volume54
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2016

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