NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — Signature Science announced this week that it has been awarded a $2.3 million contract from the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to develop a protein sequencing-based method for forensic sample analysis.
According to Signature, the system — called Proteo-ID — is designed to detect single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) in touch skin samples that can be used to identify specific individuals at random match probabilities of less than one in a billion.
The company said it it will use the IARPA funding to discover, detect, and identify genetically variable peptides that contain SAPs to calculate random match probabilities for human samples. It also plans to develop techniques for collecting and extracting protein from samples with low cell counts.
Additional details of the contract were not disclosed.
Signature last year said it received a $2.9 million IARPA contract to develop computational tools for screening DNA sequences associated with biological threats.