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Profs. Brodley, Cowen, and Slonim Awarded One-Year DARPA Grant

September 5, 2006

Professors Carla Brodley, Lenore Cowen and Donna Slonim have been awarded a one year exploratory grant from DARPA. Together with Professor Jonathan Eisen of the UC-Davis Genome center, they will explore methods for discriminating between natural and unnatural DNA. The goal of the project is to improve upon methods that can take genome sequence data and determine whether it came from an organism that has been modified by humans. This is of critical value in developing responses when an unexpected pathogen shows up in some detection system. For example, suppose an outbreak of an infectious disease is traced to a bacterium. With new sequencing methods, one could determine to a high degree of accuracy the sequence of this organism in a few days. It would be very valuable to be able to screen the genome sequence and determine the probability that this was a "natural" or an "unnatural" organism. The response (medical, legal, military) would vary greatly depend on which it was.