Environmental Metagenome Classification for Soil-based Forensic Analysis

Jolanta Kawulok, Michal Kawulok

2018

Abstract

Metagenome analysis makes it possible to extract essential information on the organisms that have left their traces in a given environmental sample. In some cases, it is sufficient to determine the origin of an environmental sample, rather than being able to accurately identify the organisms living there (which may be a challenging task). For example, in forensic soil analysis, it could be possible to confirm or exclude that a defendant was present in a certain place by comparing a soil sample acquired from his belongings against the samples derived from a variety of places (including the suspected place). In this paper, we present a method to identify the environmental origins of metagenomic reads by comparing them with entire metagenomic collections derived from reference samples. For this purpose, we exploit our CoMeta program, which allows for fast classification of metagenome samples, and we apply it to classify the extracted soil metagenomes to various collections of soil samples. The experimental results reported in this paper indicate that the proposed approach is effective, which allows us to outline the future research pathways to extend and improve our method.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kawulok J. and Kawulok M. (2018). Environmental Metagenome Classification for Soil-based Forensic Analysis. In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS; ISBN 978-989-758-280-6, SciTePress, pages 182-187. DOI: 10.5220/0006659301820187

in Bibtex Style

@conference{bioinformatics18,
author={Jolanta Kawulok and Michal Kawulok},
title={Environmental Metagenome Classification for Soil-based Forensic Analysis},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS},
year={2018},
pages={182-187},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006659301820187},
isbn={978-989-758-280-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS
TI - Environmental Metagenome Classification for Soil-based Forensic Analysis
SN - 978-989-758-280-6
AU - Kawulok J.
AU - Kawulok M.
PY - 2018
SP - 182
EP - 187
DO - 10.5220/0006659301820187
PB - SciTePress