Penn State University and Pennsylvania Department of Health researchers have received new funding from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to continue monitoring wastewater for foodborne pathogens. The grant, anticipated to amount to more than $500,000 over five years, will support research complementing related work, which has been funded by FDA since 2016.

With the grant, the research team will expand the program to isolate and conduct whole genome sequencing (WGS) on foodborne pathogens, especially Salmonella enterica and Listeria monocytogenes, from wastewater treatment facilities across Pennsylvania.

The team is led by Edward Dudley, Ph.D., the Director of the E. coli Reference Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences and a Professor of Food Science at Penn State. Other members of the research team include Nkuchia M’ikanatha, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., Lead Epidemiologist, Pennsylvania Department of Health and an affiliated researcher in Penn State’s Department of Food Science; and Jie Feng and Erika Biernbaum, Penn State doctoral candidates in food science.

Isolating and Identifying Outbreak-Associated Foodborne Pathogens in Wastewater

Dr. Dudley and his team will conduct WGS on wastewater isolates in his laboratory at Penn State to detect and identify specific pathogens. The researchers will compare their data with information from GalaxyTrakr and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Pathogen Detection website, which is an open-source, cloud-based bioinformatics platform developed by FDA to help public health laboratories analyze foodborne pathogen WGS data.

Once pathogens are identified, the Penn State researchers will work with scientists at the Pennsylvania Department of Health to analyze past outbreaks and see if they can make a connection to wastewater isolation and community circulation.

How Wastewater Surveillance Can Aid Foodborne Illness Outbreak Investigations

“Our hypothesis is that regular sampling, combined with epidemiologic data from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, will demonstrate that foodborne pathogens can routinely be isolated from community wastewaters during outbreaks,” said Dr. Dudley. He added that wastewater-based surveillance may also help identify communities where contaminated foods are being distributed.

The project’s findings will provide insights for public health agencies, potentially leading to improved foodborne illness surveillance and outbreak response.

“As opposed to point-of-care diagnostics and food sampling, wastewater-based surveillance provides a broader picture of the pathogens circulating within populations living in the catchment areas of wastewater treatment plants,” explained Dr. Dudley.

Previous Success Identifying Salmonella Outbreak Strain in Wastewater

Previous work conducted by Dr. Dudley and his team successfully isolated and sequenced a rare Salmonella serovar from Pennsylvania wastewater and connected it to a known salmonellosis outbreak.

Dr. Dudley discussed this research, as well as wastewater monitoring for foodborne pathogen surveillance more broadly, in an April 2025 episode of the Food Safety Matters podcast—listen here.