Through this proposal, the South Dakota Animal Disease Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (ADRDL) aims to enhance the food testing capacity and expertise in support of an integrated food safety system. The ADRDL is one of the nationally preeminent full service, veterinary diagnostic laboratories that provides the fastest, most accurate, and most dependable animal disease diagnostic services possible. ADRDL is a not-for-profit lab located on the campus of South Dakota State University, providing state-of- the-art diagnostic services and instrumentation for the detection of zoonotic and animal diseases and conducts over 500,000 diagnostic tests every year. In this project, the Food Safety Microbiology (FSM) section of the ADRDL will provide testing services (routine surveillance and incident response) that generates data to assist the FDA in decision making regarding the safety of the food supply consumed in the United States. By conducting food defense testing in an ISO 17025:2017 accredited environment, test results will be traceable and legally defensible. The ADRDL will also isolate and sequence genomes of 400 foodborne pathogens per year and perform bioinformatics analysis of the data and submit the metadata and raw data to NCBI sequence read archive.
