Wadsworth Center's Radiochemical, Microbiological and Chemical Testing for Food Defense and Capability Development

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PROJECT SUMMARY (Overall): The overarching goal of this proposal is to leverage the Wadsworth Center’s considerable laboratory capabilities and capacity as a world-class public health laboratory and research institute, coupled with its scientific expertise to create a first-class integrated Radiochemical, Microbiological and Chemical Testing Program for Food Defense and Capability Development that will serve the future needs of the FDA’s Food Emergency Response Network (FERN). Building on its current success as an FDA-FERN Cooperative Agreement laboratory for the Surveillance of Foods for Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Radioactivity; as an FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) Cooperative Agreement GenomeTrakr laboratory; and as a USDA Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) Cooperative Agreement laboratory for Microbiology and Chemistry Food Defense, the Wadsworth Center will provide key leadership, scientific expertise and analytical support to FERN under the proposed Laboratory Flexible Funding Model (LFFM). From microbiology, biodefense, radiochemistry and nuclear counting technologies, to chemical testing for emergency response and preparedness based on state of the art mass spectrometry, Wadsworth is often the laboratory of last resort that NY state government agencies turn to for help. The scope of this proposal includes: Microbiology Food Defense; Sequencing of isolates in the Wadsworth Center’s core sequencing facility, and the sequence and metadata uploaded to the GenomeTrakr umbrella project at NCBI; method development for molecular detection of Cyclospora cayetanensis in fresh produce using Real-Time PCR [4]; Chemistry Food Defense for organic and inorganic toxins; Radiological screening and quantification for  , and  emitters in food products; and development of a method for arsenic speciation in seafood by LC-ICP-MS.