New Mexico State University Laboratory Flexible Funding Model (U19)

<p>Project Summary: Overall The NMSU Food Safety Laboratory (FSL) will work towards achieving FERN objectives by ensuring that trained staff are able to participate in FERN activities such as proficiency tests, evaluation of new methodologies and analysis of surveillance and emergency outbreak samples. The NMSU FSL proposes to improve our current Quality Management System by hiring a quality manager to work with the NMSU FSL director, staff and APHL to achieve and maintain ISO 17025 accreditation. The NMSU FSL proposes to partner with the New Mexico Indian Health Services and the New Mexico Gaming Commission to collect food samples from New Mexico tribal nations. Until the IHS agreement is in place, NMSU FSL could collect 200 papaya sample and 300 frozen tropical fruit samples and analyze them for Salmonella enterica, Listeria monocytogenes and STEC until we establish our new sample collection arrangement. The NMSU FSL proposes to sequence a mixture of 400 or more pathogens and share the results (and metadata) in real-time to the National Center for Biotechnology Information national database for enteric pathogen genomes. The NMSU FSL could better serve the FDA FERN if we could conduct additional analyses. The BAM molecular detection procedure for Cyclospora cayetanensis is one method that we could establish in our laboratory to provide testing support to the FDA in the event of a foodborne disease outbreak. The NMSU FSL plans to collaborate with the New Mexico Indian Health Services to conduct sampling within the NM Tribal Nations' food supply. The NMSU FSL proposes to participate in small-scale method development/validation as a part of the LFFM. We are proposing to participate in the MLV for qPCR method for Salmonella.</p>