Researchers at the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have been awarded a research program contract from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to sequence, assemble, and annotate a population of bacterial pathogens using two high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies in support of the expansion of a vetted public reference database.
The continued development of HTS technologies for accurate identification of microorganisms for diagnostic use will have significant impact on human healthcare, biothreat response, food safety, and other areas. Developing a comprehensive, curated database of microbial genome sequences and associated metadata will serve as a valuable reference to evaluate and assess HTS-based diagnostic devices. Leading the sequencing and analysis phases of the project, the Genomics Resource Center (GRC) at the Institute is a cutting-edge genomic sequencing and analysis center with a long history of high-quality microbial genomics research that has sequenced and analyzed more than 5,000 microbial genome sequences in just the past five years.