ISO 17025 Maintenance and Whole Genome Sequencing for State Food Testing Laboratory

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The Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) is a well-equipped laboratory that employs over twelve analysts for food testing, and four team leads for data review. Currently, the DSHS Laboratory has surveillance programs in place to monitor ground meat and ready to eat meat products, milk plant and dairy farm products, seafood products, and bay water for the presence of biological organisms and other toxic substances. DSHS has the capability to respond to food related emergencies including outbreaks. The objective of this project is to advance the goal of a national food safety system by: 1. Ensuring microbiological and chemical food analyses, performed on behalf of the state manufactured food regulatory programs, are conducted within the scope of an International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/ International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 17025 accredited laboratory; 2. Strengthening the collaboration between the laboratories and state manufactured food regulatory programs; 3. Increasing the number of state samples collected and analyzed for surveillance purposes annually; 4. Developing a stronger international rapid surveillance system for pathogen traceback, through the GenomeTrackr network, using a minimum set of metadata fields for all food and environmental isolates. This proposal includes funding for: 1. Maintain and enhance scope of analyses ISO 17025 accredited and ensuring all ISO standards are meet by employee qualified staff and participating in an approved proficiency test program. 2. Continuing to build on the relationship with the state manufactured food program by purchasing supplies for accredited food testing to support the sampling plan; 3. Ensuring a sampling agreement plan outlines a minimum of 75 samples per year to be tested; 4. Hiring a new molecular biologist who will continue to develop whole genome sequencing (WGS) for the Genome Trackr project, ensuring all metadata fields are completed.