The 100K Genome Project, led by the University of California, Davis, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (FDA-CFSAN), and Agilent Technologies, announced on July 22 that it has added 20 newly completed genome sequences of foodborne pathogens to its public database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

With these additions, which include several isolates of Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, and Vibrio, the NCBI database now contains 30 completed genome sequences.  The genomes were determined using Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing technology from Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc., according to UC-Davis.

Long term, the mission of the 100K Genome Project is to sequence 100,000 bacterial and viral genomes, in an effort to speed the diagnosis and treatment of foodborne diseases, and to limit both the duration and the spread of foodborne illness outbreaks.

“These finished genome sequences represent the highest quality standard, with each strain closed in a single bacterial chromosome and the associated mobile DNA,” said Bart Weimer, director of the 100K Genome Project and professor at the school of veterinary medicine at UC Davis.  “They also contain complete associated phage or plasmid elements, which are critical for understanding pathogenicity, drug resistance and other biologically important traits that are linked to survival."

Additional details are available from UC-Davis.