Abstract
Violence against women is an urgent global problem, as over one third of women worldwide has been victim of physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. And remarkably, only 25% of reported rape cases in Europe ultimately lead to a conviction, often due to the difficulty of providing evidence. Recent advances in microbial profiling have uncovered that each individual is home to complex microbial communities. These communities inhabit all surfaces of the human body (for example, orogastrointestinal tract, respiratory tract, urogenital tract, skin) and collectively represent the human microbiota, with their microbial DNA signatures forming the microbiome. Recent research suggests that the microbiome could greatly aid forensic casework as a promising tool to strengthen traditional forensic investigative methods and fill related knowledge gaps. Large-scale microbiome studies indicate that microbial fingerprinting can assist forensics in areas such as trace evidence, source tracking, geolocation, and circumstances of death. The goal of this project to investigate the potential of the female microbiome as an additional forensic tool in criminal investigations, with a focus on sexual assault cases. We aim to do this in three ways. First, we want to establish a large, curated dataset with 16S rRNA and (shallow) shotgun sequences of vaginal, skin and saliva samples. Second, we want to re-create forensically relevant samples (i.e., mock crime scenes) such as mixtures, long-term stored traces, sexual intercourse samples, etc. in a controlled environment. These samples will carry a crucial added-value to the curated dataset that will serve as a training set. At last, we aim to validate our hypotheses and the developed classification model in collaboration with the Institute of Forensic Medicine at University of Zurich. This tool will be able: i) to predict traces of body sites/fluids taken from other body sites/fluids or, in other words, to discriminate "pure" from mixture samples; ii) to predict from a vaginal sample whether intercourse has recently taken place. For the validation of this model, we aim to sequence the microbiome of at least 100 vaginal, skin and saliva samples from real-life sexual violence crimes that occurred in the district of Antwerp. This is not only highly favorable but also necessary to have a robust dataset to test out hypotheses and which can function as a solid test set. Being able to sequence 100 sexual assault samples would give as a strong chance to validate our hypotheses and classification model.
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