The events of FY01 dynamically reprogrammed the objectives of the CBNP bioinformatics support team, to meet rapidly-changing Homeland Defense needs and requests from other agencies for assistance: Use computational techniques to determine potential unique DNA signature candidates for microbial and viral pathogens of interest to CBNP researcher and to our collaborating partner agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Defense (DOD), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Develop effective electronic screening measures for DNA signatures to reduce the cost and time of wet-bench screening. Build a comprehensive system for tracking the development and testing of DNA signatures. Build a chain-of-custody sample tracking system for field deployment of the DNA signatures as part of the BASIS project. Provide computational tools for use by CBNP Biological Foundations researchers.

The purpose of the Ventilation Model is to simulate the heat transfer processes in and around waste emplacement drifts during periods of forced ventilation. The model evaluates the effects of emplacement drift ventilation on the thermal conditions in the emplacement drifts and surrounding rock mass, and calculates the heat removal by ventilation as a measure of the viability of ventilation to delay the onset of peak repository temperature and reduce its magnitude. The heat removal by ventilation is temporally and spatially dependent, and is expressed as the fraction of heat carried away by the ventilation air compared to the fraction of heat produced by radionuclide decay. One minus the heat removal is called the wall heat fraction, or the remaining amount of heat that is transferred via conduction to the surrounding rock mass. Downstream models, such as the ''Multiscale Thermohydrologic Model'' (BSC 2001), use the wall heat fractions as outputted from the Ventilation Model to initialize their postclosure analyses.