The MiSAFE team
Our team is composed of three academic institutions, two companies (SMEs) and two police departments.
Coordinator:
Prof. Edouard Jurkevitch
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Phone: +972 8 9489167
E-mail: edouard.jurkevitch@mail.huji.ac.il
Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Israel
Prof. Edouard Jurkevitch
HUJI will coordinate the project, linking
between the groups, making sure that tasks
are fulfilled, planning meetings, delivering
reports and devising alternatives to overcome
unexpected hurdles. HUJI will be assisted by
ECL in managing the administrative tasks. HUJI will lead WP4 that focuses on providing a large data set of microbial soil analyses based on T-RFLP and MPS, extended to include complementary environmental data on the collection of the analysed soils, and developing methods to account for temporal variability of microbial profiles in soil samples. This data, along with that from other WPs will be used to construct T-RFLP analysis tools and a geoforensics database in WP5. HUJI will be responsible for this part in the CLCB-led WP5.
CLC Bio -
Qiagen,
Denmark
Roald Forsberg
CLCBio brings its software platform, primarily CLC Genomics Workbench, CLC Genomics Server, CLC Bioinformatics Database, and the CLC Software Developer Kit to the project. Building the MiSafe platform on top of this well tested, highly specialized and comprehensive code base will save significant development time and hereby enable a sharper focus on the scientific and commercial goals of the project.
Israel Police,
Israel
Dr. Ron Gafny
The Forensics Biology Laboratory) will perform
all the T-RFLP analysis of samples provided by
the HUJI group, and will assist in the validation
of the technical procedures, including sampling,
DNA processing and analysis, and forensics scenarios, and provide legal aspects of the procedures.
Guardia Civil
Espanola, Spain
Jose Cordero
The Criminalistic Service will actively collaborate
to the development and assessment of the forensic
uses of microbial profiling and will be responsible
for the validation of the protocols and procedures
to be implemented in forensics units. The Criminalistic Service will also help provide legal assessment of the use of the novel technologies.
Libragen, France
Dr. Patrick Robe
Libragen will contribute to WP1. The main
tasks of Libragen will be devoted to the
comprehensive evaluation of a wide
spectrum of available commercial kits and
reagents or traditional methods for the extraction and purification of nucleic acids from environmental soil samples to select the most performing protocol for an evaluation in forensic application.
Ecole Centrale
de Lyon,
France
Prof. Pascal Simonet
The Environmental Microbial Genomics group at ECL will act as WP leader of WP3 and collaborate in WP1 and WP2. The objective is to estimate the appropriateness of novel environmental molecular technologies in forensics,
to consider the conceptual problem of population size heterogeneity in the soil bacterial community (the rare biosphere), and technical issues of sampling and of DNA extraction. Microcosm-based experiments will be carried out to search for improved biomarkers in specific soils using state of the art MPS of amplicons and metagenomic DNA, QPCR, Phylochips and functional microarrays. Preliminary tests will be carried out using an invaluable reference resource for the study of microcosms: a reference soil previously extensively studied in the frame of the ‘Terragenome’ international consortium, and an available 5x109 bp of metagenomic sequence data produced from soil samples collected at different depths and time points. Applicability of the technology to characterize and detect biomarkers in other soils will be investigated in order to determine its sensitivity, specificity and reliability in a forensic context.
James Hutton
Institute, UK
Prof. Lorna Dawson
JHI will lead WPs 2 and assist the Coordinator with WP7. JHI will contribute to all WPs. They will carry out data mining of the extensive available databases, carry out application to the development of GIS tools, and carry out experimentation to ascertain the robust determination and testing of the sequence of potential for developing the fingerprinting approach suitable for forensics. They have considerable expertise and experience working with soils and have extensive soils databases of a wide range of soil types. They hold extensive state-of–the-art data (XRD, FTIR, mT-RFLP, etc.) and have available suitably archived soils stored for further experimentation (including biological analyses).
