title: Expansion of Microbial Forensics.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics, Institute of Applied Genetics, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Sarah E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Schmedes
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics, Institute of Applied Genetics, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth, Texas, USA Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Antti
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sajantila
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics, Institute of Applied Genetics, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth, Texas, USA Center of Excellence in Genomic Medicine Research (CEGMR), King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia bruce.budowle@unthsc.edu.
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-4116-2930
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Budowle
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D005554:Forensic Medicine / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D008828:Microbiological Techniques / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends