Focus for Sequencing Consortium: Select Agents, Microbial Forensics

Abstract

Federal agencies now sponsor a broad variety of microbial genomic sequencing programs, making it difficult to keep up with their progress. Here is a look at one of them, launched in 2009 and targeting select agents, that is, pathogens which could be used by terrorists as weapons. This program involves five-year contracts to three institutions, with resources totaling more than $106 million, according to officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the federal sponsor. The awards went to the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Md., and the Institute for Genome Science (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Each of these institutes is designated a Genomic Sequencing Center for Infectious Diseases (GSCID), and together they form a consortium. The Broad Institute and JCVI each received $43.3 million, and the IGS, $20 million.