The UK Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is seeking proposals addressing challenges within the field of microbial forensics. Microbial forensics aims to determine whether an incident involving a biological hazard is natural or nefarious in origin, providing more information than just the identification of a biological organism (eg provenance of the material).
Up to £250,000 is available for projects of up to 18 months. Innovations must start at a minimum TRL 2 and progress to at minimum TRL 4/maximum TRL 8 over the project.
Proposals must address at least one of the following challenges:
Challenge 1 – Novel Computational Analysis Tools for Genomic Data – additional computational tools, potentially exploiting artificial intelligence and/or machine learning. These could enhance the opportunity to detect anomalies in genome sequencing data (eg evidence of biological engineering, presence of anti-microbial resistance (AMR) markers, information regarding source etc). The tools could be applied to genomes of isolated pathogens and / or complex metagenomics backgrounds. The expectation is that any computational tools will be easily integrated into analysis pipelines running on Linux-based operating systems, be command-line executed, and written in a widely used programming language such as Python or C.
Challenge 2 – Approaches for the Identification and/or Computational Analysis of Other Omic Signatures – technologies that could either generate and / or provide computational tools to analyse omic signatures other than genomics (eg. proteomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, metabolomics, other). Ideally, these markers are required to be robust enough such that they remain present even following passage through a host.
Proposals are due 18 February 2025.
An information webinar will be held 9 January 2025. Register here.
One-to-one teleconference sessions will be available 15 and 21 January 2025. Booking details will be released 10 January 2025.
