Maintenance and Enhancement of ISO/IEC 17025 Accreditation and Whole Genome Sequencing for State Food Testing Laboratories

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Project Summary/Abstract: The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets (NYSDAM) has an expansive food safety inspection and regulatory laboratory testing program. The New York State Food Laboratory (Food Laboratory), a division within the NYSDAM, has the mission to provide expert state of the art analytical testing in support of food safety programs in New York State. The Food Laboratory, through food testing, provides support to the divisions of Food Safety and Inspection, and Milk Control and Dairy Services. It is the primary servicing laboratory for the New York manufactured food regulatory program and is accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard. The Food Laboratory has comprehensive testing programs for both foodborne pathogens and chemical residues/toxic elements in food and beverages. If funded for Competition A, the Food Laboratory will maintain a quality management system compliant with the managerial and technical requirements of ISO/IEC 17025 and continue to be accredited by a recognized accreditation body. It will also continue to expand the number of methods and technologies within our scope of accreditation, support training of laboratory staff, and maintain current staff resources to the laboratory Quality Assurance Unit. If funded for Competition B, New York State Food Laboratory will maintain the Research Collaboration Agreement with CFSAN for the GenomeTrakr network. It will continue to sequence a mixture of four hundred (400) or more foodborne related bacterial isolates and in real-time coordination with FDA CFSAN, deposit results, including the metadata, in to the NCBI- NIH curated national database for enteric pathogen genomes. It will also seek partnership with universities, government agencies, and other stakeholders to support the collection of isolates. The NYSDAM fully supports FDA’s initiative of an integrated food safety system and is engaged in participating in these collaborative projects that aim to improve and optimize the nation’s food safety system.