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

Project Summary/Abstract:The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets (NYSDAM) has an expansive foodsafety inspection and regulatory laboratory testing program. The New York State FoodLaboratory (Food Laboratory), a division within the NYSDAM, has the mission to provide expertstate of the art analytical testing in support of food safety programs in New York State. TheFood Laboratory, through food testing, provides support to the divisions of Food Safety andInspection, and Milk Control and Dairy Services. It is the primary servicing laboratory for theNew York manufactured food regulatory program and is accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025standard. The Food Laboratory has comprehensive testing programs for both foodbornepathogens and chemical residues/toxic elements in food and beverages.If funded for Competition A, the Food Laboratory will maintain a quality management systemcompliant with the managerial and technical requirements of ISO/IEC 17025 and continue to beaccredited by a recognized accreditation body. It will also continue to expand the number ofmethods 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 ResearchCollaboration Agreement with CFSAN for the GenomeTrakr network. It will continue tosequence a mixture of four hundred (400) or more foodborne related bacterial isolates and inreal-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 withuniversities, 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 engagedin participating in these collaborative projects that aim to improve and optimize the nation?s foodsafety system.