What is "precision food safety"?

Genomics and related tools are beginning to have a tremendous impact on food safety by allowing for a more precise approach to pathogen detection, characterization, and identification. The data produced using these tools are expected to lead to a paradigm shift in modern food safety concepts with impacts similar to those facilitated through development of personalized medicine methods in human medicine. We hence envision a future of food safety that can be best described as “precision food safety”. While precision food safety will employ a number of new approaches and methods, omics tools will play a particularly important role and will provide for improved and more precise food safety procedures, including increasingly accurate risk assessment that will support evidence-based food safety decision-making. 

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Cited from: Kovac J, Bakker H, Carroll LM, Wiedmann M. 2017. Trend in Analytical Chemistry. 96:52-61 Precision food safety: A systems approach to food safety facilitated by genomics tools - ScienceDirect

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The implementation of whole-genome sequencing in food safety has revolutionized foodborne pathogen tracking and outbreak investigations. The vast amounts of genomic data that are being produced through ongoing surveillance efforts continue advancing our understanding of pathogen diversity and genome biology. Produced genomic data are also supporting the use of metagenomics and meta-transcriptomics for detection and functional characterization of microbiological hazards in foods and food processing environments. In addition to that, many studies have shown that metabolic and pathogenic potential, antimicrobial resistance, and other phenotypes relevant to food safety can be predicted from whole-genome sequences, omitting the need for multiple laboratory tests. Nevertheless, further work in the area of functional inference is necessary to enable accurate interpretation of functional information inferred from genomic and metagenomic data, as well as real-time detection and tracking of high-risk pathogen subtypes and microbiomes.

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Cited from: Kovac J. 2019. Precision Food Safety: a Paradigm Shift in Detection and Control of Foodborne Pathogens. Precision Food Safety: a Paradigm Shift in Detection and Control of Foodborne Pathogens | mSystems (asm.org)

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