Dr. Eric Brown, Director of the Division of Microbiology in FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition will present a seminar entitled “Adaptive Change, Traceability, and the Sleuthing of Pathogens Back to Their Source: How Whole Genome Sequencing Currently Augments Food Safety for Industry, Government, and the Public Health ”. The talk will highlight the recent advancements that have been made in the development and application of cutting-edge whole-genome sequencing (WGS) tools and pipelines that are enabling industry to have unprecedented insight into contamination and quality control in terms of product safety including but not limited to the potential monitoring and traceability of raw materials and supply lines, facility mapping of bacterial contaminants for precision traceback, and overall assessments of the microbial health of facilities using metagenomic approaches. Recent advances in WGS technology are enabling public health officials to adapt and foster a “one-health” approach, collecting genomic information about bacterial pathogens as close to the field as possible and providing genome sequences now for traceability and root cause investigation across the farm-to-form continuum in a very rapid and cost-effective manner. Additionally, whole-genome sequence data is now beginning to reveal specific adaptations that have accrued among some of the most problematic pathogens that persist on farms and in food production/processing environments. This new-found knowledge is now starting to reveal the underlying genetic causes of unique adaptive changes that certain pathogens now retain and should ultimately provide precision solutions to controlling these difficult strains in situ. These and other breakthroughs in food safety- focused WGS science will be discussed.
Dr. Eric Brown, Director of the Division of Microbiology in FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition will present a seminar entitled “Adaptive Change, Traceability, and the Sleuthing of Pathogens Back to Their Source: How Whole Genome Sequencing Currently Augments Food Safety for Industry, Government, and the Public Health ”. The talk will highlight the recent advancements that have been made in the development and application of cutting-edge whole-genome sequencing (WGS) tools and pipelines that are enabling industry to have unprecedented insight into contamination and quality control in terms of product safety including but not limited to the potential monitoring and traceability of raw materials and supply lines, facility mapping of bacterial contaminants for precision traceback, and overall assessments of the microbial health of facilities using metagenomic approaches. Recent advances in WGS technology are enabling public health officials to adapt and foster a “one-health” approach, collecting genomic information about bacterial pathogens as close to the field as possible and providing genome sequences now for traceability and root cause investigation across the farm-to-form continuum in a very rapid and cost-effective manner. Additionally, whole-genome sequence data is now beginning to reveal specific adaptations that have accrued among some of the most problematic pathogens that persist on farms and in food production/processing environments. This new-found knowledge is now starting to reveal the underlying genetic causes of unique adaptive changes that certain pathogens now retain and should ultimately provide precision solutions to controlling these difficult strains in situ. These and other breakthroughs in food safety- focused WGS science will be discussed.
