ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Bacillus anthracis comparative genome analysis in support of the Amerithrax investigation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed, 171 citations in OpenAlex.
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- PathogenicPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- The Notable Achievements and the Prospects of Bacterial Pathogen Genomics.Microorganisms · 2022Article
- barCoder: a tool to generate unique, orthogonal genetic tags for qPCR detection.BMC bioinformatics · 2021Article
- Natural outbreaks and bioterrorism: How to deal with the two sides of the same coin?Journal of global health · 2020Review
- Biowarfare, bioterrorism and biocrime: A historical overview on microbial harmful applications.Forensic science international · 2020Review
- Genetic diversity of Bacillus anthracis Ames lineage strains in China.BMC infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Detection of Protein Toxin Simulants from Contaminated Surfaces by Paper Spray Mass Spectrometry.Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry · 2019Article
- You can't always sequence your way out of a tight spot: Next-generation sequencing holds great promise for pathogen detection, but the devil is in the details.EMBO reports · 2018Article
- Microbial forensics: new breakthroughs and future prospects.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2018Review
- Genomic epidemiology of clinical Campylobacter spp. at a single health trust site.Microbial genomics · 2018Article
- Deep learning to predict the lab-of-origin of engineered DNA.Nature communications · 2018Article
- A Standard Method To Inactivate Bacillus anthracis Spores to Sterility via Gamma Irradiation.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2018Article
- Variant site strain typer (VaST): efficient strain typing using a minimal number of variant genomic sites.BMC bioinformatics · 2018Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
18 authors at 7 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Before the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, the developing field of microbial forensics relied on microbial genotyping schemes based on a small portion of a genome sequence. Amerithrax, the investigation into the anthrax letter attacks, applied high-resolution whole-genome sequencing and comparative genomics to identify key genetic features of the letters' Bacillus anthracis Ames strain. During systematic microbiological analysis of the spore material from the letters, we identified a number of morphological variants based on phenotypic characteristics and the ability to sporulate. The genomes of these morphological variants were sequenced and compared with that of the B. anthracis Ames ancestor, the progenitor of all B. anthracis Ames strains. Through comparative genomics, we identified four distinct loci with verifiable genetic mutations. Three of the four mutations could be directly linked to sporulation pathways in B. anthracis and more specifically to the regulation of the phosphorylation state of Spo0F, a key regulatory protein in the initiation of the sporulation cascade, thus linking phenotype to genotype. None of these variant genotypes were identified in single-colony environmental B. anthracis Ames isolates associated with the investigation. These genotypes were identified only in B. anthracis morphotypes isolated from the letters, indicating that the variants were not prevalent in the environment, not even the environments associated with the investigation. This study demonstrates the forensic value of systematic microbiological analysis combined with whole-genome sequencing and comparative genomics.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.