Sequencing

11th Annual Sequencing, Finishing, and Analysis in the Future Meeting
RIGEL: ANALYSIS SYSTEM FOR MICROBIAL
ATTRIBUTION, BIOFORENSICS AND
BIOSURVEILLANCE
Thursday, 2nd June 14:20 La Fonda Ballroom Talk (OS‐6.04)
Willy Valdivia 1 , Deepak Sheoran 1 , Juergen Richt 2 , Chester Mcdowell 2
1 Orion Integrated Biosciences Inc., 2 Kansas State University
The use of weapons of mass destruction and in particular biowarfare agents have produced different
appreciations and responses by the international community. From the sixties to the nineties, security
efforts focused on state players and the development of countermeasures against traditional
bioweapons. However, this attention shifted as extremist groups and individuals used pathogens in
acts of bioterrorism and dual use technologies including synthetic biology became available (1). It
is argued that next generation high throughput DNA sequencing offers the possibility of typing
biological samples for microbial infection diagnosis, attribution, bioforensics and biosurveillance.
However, the sensitivity and accuracy thresholds of these analyses can be affected by the error
rate of databases storing information of reference genomes. The ambiguity of metadata associated
with specific strains and the contamination genomic material during sequencing can affect the
confidence of attribution. Although several algorithms have been developed to identify pathogenspecific
genomic signatures, the use of these libraries to determine the taxonomic composition of
a given metagenomics sample is affected by the mutational landscape, the sample size, the number
of DNA reads generated by each sample, the use of phylogenetic distances and statistical weights to
establish a probability match. In order to address these challenges, here we summarize our work
towards the development of an integrated and comprehensive genomic‐based analytical strategy for
known and unknown microbial taxonomic composition assessment. This architecture can establish
accurately intra‐ and interspecies relationships among more than 380,000 known taxonomies.
RIGEL generates motif fingerprints and genomic signatures and during this process; errors in
reference entries are flagged, disambiguated, corrected and/or eliminated. Once this process is
completed RIGEL‐ mtp can be deployed to scan genomic or metagenomics samples from any
sequencing platform. We demonstrate the performance of our system using more than 200 genomes
of Fransicella tularensis, Bacillus anthracis, Burkholderia spp. In addition, we summarize the analysis
of more than 1000 clinical, biological and environmental metagenomic samples sequenced with
different technologies. Our presentation summarizes the benchmarking of sensitivity, speed and
accuracy in the discrimination of known vs. unknown microbial species and/or strains at resolution
levels to support biosurveillance and bioforensics efforts. In addition, we summarize the performance
of our technology during the 2015‐2016 Zika outbreak in South America and the 2016
Elizabethkingia outbreak in the US.
1.W. A. Valdivia‐Granda, Biosurveillance enterprise for operational awareness, a genomic‐based
approach for tracking pathogen virulence. Virulence 4, (Oct 23, 2013).
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