FDA shares testing technology
Providing an unprecedented tool to quickly identify food pathogens, the Food and Drug Administration is actively sharing the technology of whole genome sequencing (WGS) with state, federal and international labs.
The technology can identify the nature and source of microbes that contaminate food and cause outbreaks of illness, according to a news release.
Eric Brown, the director of the Division of Microbiology at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition said the technology can determine if the bacterial genome of contaminated food matches that of people who have become sick from foodborne illness.
“Since bacteria develop genetic traits in response to their specific geographic environment, it is now possible to obtain hints about their origin through sequencing,” Brown said in the release. “So to have this tool in our hands now and to localize contamination to specific parts of the world very quickly really goes a long way to help the inspectors that we have out in the field at any given time.”
Since 2012, when the FDA started GenomeTrakr — a network of laboratories that use WGS to identify pathogens — the network expanded from 10 FDA and four state laboratories to its current status of more than 60 domestic and international laboratories. The FDA has been instrumental in developing additional software tools to help analyze whole genome sequencing data by GenomeTrakr partners, according to the release. The agency also is working with the World Health Organization and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization to make this technology available to developing nations.
Brown said the FDA is asking all laboratories to upload their bacterial sequences to a database at the National Institutes of Health, which can be accessed by regulators, public health experts, consumers, and industry.
“This open-source availability has been one of the great innovations of the network, allowing everyone to have access to the data at any time,” Brown said in the release.
“Hopefully, if there is a (food contamination) event, we will find the source much more quickly and remove it from the food supply so that our consumers can be as safe as they can possibly be.”
