By Amber Dance

A decade ago this month, a microbiologist at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, took a special delivery from the US government. Federal investigators wanted the scientist, Paul Keim, to identify the anthrax that appeared in letters mailed to news organizations and US lawmakers. Overnight, he used PCR to determine that the anthrax sent was the Ames strain, commonly used in research—but that was just the beginning of a scientific investigation that would catapult the still wet-behind-the-ears science of microbial forensics to the forefront of the criminal inquiry.

Ten years on, Keim’s PCR-based technique seems downright quaint in comparison with modern, speedy DNA sequencing. “In a lot of ways we’ve matured,” says Bruce Budowle of the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. But there are challenges ahead, adds Budowle, who retired in 2009 from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), where he was involved in the anthrax studies as a senior scientist in the laboratory division: “In a lot of ways, we’ve got a long way to go… We haven’t grown in the interpretation of the results and what they might mean.”

Overall, the country has improved in many aspects of preparedness. The US government spent $60 billion on biodefense over the last decade, including the 2004 founding of Project BioShield. The $5.6 billion initiative, managed by the government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) since 2006, is charged with stockpiling medicines and funding research on new therapies that could be used in instances of bioterrorism. And the spending continues: last month, BARDA awarded a five-year $68 million contract to the New Jersey company Elusys Therapeutics to develop a prophylactic treatment against anthrax.

(Click here to continue reading.)

Image: via Wikimedia Commons