NCJ Number
212645
Journal
Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 50 Issue: 6 Dated: November 2005 Pages: 1380-1385
Date Published
November 2005
Length
6 pages
Annotation
Since the biological classification of infectious microorganisms is often complex and ambiguous, contributing to uncertainty and confusion for scientists involved in biosecurity work, the project reported in this article created a database known as the "Microbial Rosetta Stone," which resolves many of these ambiguities and includes links to additional information on the microbes.
Abstract
This article describes the population of data tables in the Microbial Rosetta Stone Database and provides charts that show the relatedness of important infectious microorganisms. Organism names from government high-priority pathogen lists are converted to NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) species names, facilitating computational analysis and linkage to public genomic databases. The project presents additional links to disease information, seminal publications, genomic sequence data, and other external data sources. Frequent updates to the database and the addition of new tables are required in maintaining the usefulness of this resource. The database is currently supported by government agencies responsible for biosecurity, but a version of the full system should be publicly available soon. Details of the data model and computational methods used to create and maintain the database will be described in a separate paper. This article is an introduction and visual accompaniment to the database and provides a basic explanation of the issues that must be addressed to avoid confusion in users. 1 table, 3 figures, and 18 references