SPECIAL NOTICE
A -- BRICS Part 2 Webinar
- Notice Date
- 4/19/2017
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 541711
— Research and Development in Biotechnology
- Contracting Office
- Other Defense Agencies, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Contracts Management Office, 675 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia, 22203-2114, United States
- ZIP Code
- 22203-2114
- Solicitation Number
- DARPA-SN-17-36
- Archive Date
- 5/18/2017
- Point of Contact
- Dr. Justin Gallivan,
- E-Mail Address
-
BRICS@darpa.mil
(BRICS@darpa.mil)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a Webinar, on Monday, May 8, 2017, in support of an anticipated solicitation, the Biological Robustness in Complex Settings (BRICS) Part 2 Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). DARPA seeks innovative approaches to the development of engineered Forensic Microbial Systems (FMS) that may be deployed in complex environments to create unique microbial signatures for environmental forensics operations. This event will provide critical information on the program vision, the program objectives, and opportunities associated with the development of an interdisciplinary proposal to respond to the BAA. Program Objective and Description The BRICS program is divided in two Parts described in two separate BAAs. The BAA for BRICS Part 1 was published in 2014 and requested proposals aimed at elucidating the design principles of engineering robust biological consortia. Robustness in this context can be described as the ability of a consortium of organisms to safely and reliably perform a particular task while being subjected to perturbation(s). For example, an engineered biological system designed to detect specific compounds in soil would have to function reliably and predictably in varying temperatures and light conditions (day or night), changing nutrient conditions (not knowable in advance), and in the presence of endogenous organisms that will vary by location. Performers funded from that solicitation have been exploring approaches to increase the biological robustness of engineered organisms, including methods to engineer artificial symbiotic relationships between microbial species, general plasmid systems that can transform undomesticated microbes, and methods that limit unintended spread or evolution of engineered functions in engineered microbes. Their efforts are now producing generalizable approaches that could be integrated into a wide variety of functional synthetic biological systems. With the BRICS Part 2 BAA, DARPA is soliciting solutions to a specific challenge scenario that will require the integration of capabilities developed in BRICS Part 1 and serve as a test of the real world utility of those technologies. Whereas work to this point in the program has been primarily focused on the development of tools with many potential applications, BRICS Part 2 is concerned with solving technical challenges associated with the engineering of microbial systems that can be used for forensics applications in specific environments. At the forefront of DNA evidence techniques, microbiome "fingerprinting" is currently being developed to take advantage of the background sequences in metagenomic samples. In this technique, the distribution and diversity of all microbes in a particular sample, as determined using next generation sequencing (NGS), is used to create a sequence profile that is thought to be unique to the sample site. Although just beginning to be explored, the immense diversity of microbes in any environment, and the ability of people and places to share microbes when they come into contact make microbiome fingerprinting a potentially powerful forensic technology. Indeed, recent studies have shown that homes can be matched to inhabitants, personal relationships between individuals can be revealed, and personal objects can be matched to owners with good accuracy by comparing microbiome profiles of people, places, and objects. Impressively, the places that a person has walked throughout the day can be discovered through the microbes on the soles of their shoes. Microbiome fingerprinting appears to have great potential for geolocation applications, including the mapping of smuggling routes, ensuring the provenance of controlled items, and establishing the origin of imports for tariffs. The inclusion of microbiome analysis could also significantly expand the amount of trace information obtained from a relatively small place of interest, such as a crime scene. However, rather than the needle-in-a-haystack problem that human DNA forensics represents, microbiome profiling involves finding the degree of similarity between two or more haystacks. The accuracy with which that can be done improves with the amount of data that can be collected from each haystack. The need for large data sets and reference databases limits the compatibility of the technique with mobile hand-held devices for portable field operations, which would be important for monitoring supply chains, for example. Furthermore, the spatial resolution of microbiome fingerprinting, particularly for outdoor locations, is potentially limited by disruptive forces such as weather and traffic, which can cause the microbiome profile to change over time and blur the results in small spaces. While microbiome fingerprinting clearly has good potential, for now the signal-to-noise ratios are often too low to result in accurate conclusions. If the number of sequences needed to distinguish microbial profiles could be dramatically reduced to minimize the time and effort involved in highly accurate detection, it is possible that the technique could become practical for a wide range of applications. Development of synthetic microbiomes with well-defined signatures could solve some of these technical problems and complement existing efforts in this new field. Registration Information Participants must register to attend the BRICS Part 2 Webinar through the registration website: http://events.sa-meetings.com/BRICS2ProposersDay. Advance registration is required for every individual intending to view the Webinar, regardless of whether said individuals will be watching the webcast as a group. The Webinar URL will be provided once participants have registered. Webinar registration is limited to 500 remote participants. There is no fee for the Webinar. Registration Opens: Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at 12:00 PM ET Registration Closes: Wednesday, May 3, 2017 at 4:00 PM ET Administrative questions should be addressed to BRICS@darpa.mil. Please refer to the BRICS Part 2 Webinar (DARPA-SN-17-36) in all correspondence. Disclaimers Viewing of the BRICS Part 2 Webinar is voluntary and is not required to propose to the BRICS Part 2 BAA on this topic. The Webinar does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals or abstracts. This announcement is issued solely for information and program planning purposes and is not a request for proposals; any so sent will be returned without review. Point of Contact Dr. Justin Gallivan, Program Manager, DARPA/BTO; Email: BRICS@darpa.mil.
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