Microbial Forensics: a New Forensic Discipline

In microbial forensics, researchers work to track down the source of a microbe, whether in a criminal investigation of bioterrorism attacks or a study of naturally occurring disease outbreak. It is interplay of classical microbiology, microbial genomics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. Although microbes have been used as weapons for centuries, the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 generated great terror in the public and revealed the need to establish "attribution." The benefit is that it might deter at least some potential terrorists and also help in tracing natural outbreaks of disease. Microbial forensic data must hold up not only to the scrutiny of scientists in the health care community, but also to the scrutiny of judges and juries and national policy and decision makers. It poses a great challenge to develop newer techniques as the present techniques like gene sequencing, hybridization, microarray, spectrophotometry, PCR etc. are inadequate. A national microbial forensics plan needs to be developed.