Life Tech Announces Five-Year Deal with FDA for E. Coli-Salmonella Testing

Life Technologies Corporation

today announced that it has signed a five-year agreement with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to accelerate and advance food safety testing of E. coli and Salmonella, two foodborne contaminants commonly associated with outbreaks and/or recalls. The collaboration consists of three distinctive projects: o Life Technologies will design and validate new food safety tests for the detection and identification of foodborne pathogens, with pathogen strains provided by the FDA. o Life Technologies will design and validate a complete workflow for food pathogen detection on the Ion PGM™ platform, while optimizing sample preparation methods. o The FDA will have the opportunity to evaluate new disruptive technology platforms by Life Technologies for the use in pathogen detection. Life Technologies will use its bioinformatics resources to independently develop real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) assays against unique E. coli and Salmonella targets in collaboration with the FDA.  It will then provide the test results for these targets to the FDA for further validation. The FDA will use Life Technologies' Ion PGM™ Sequencer to generate whole genome sequence information from defined bacteria, and for strains that will be excluded from detection.  Life Technologies' bioinformatics team will then analyze the genomic information and provide assays or tests to the FDA for further validation and analysis. Whole genome sequences generated under the collaboration will be added to the National Institutes of Health Genbank so they can be accessed by the food safety research community.