UK: Genomics helps detect Salmonella outbreaks
Food Safety Watch: Public Health England (PHE) has released information about how it uses the developing science of genomics to identify and characterise Salmonella isolates and detect related clusters of illness that could signify foodborne outbreaks.
The PHE Gastrointestinal Bacteria Reference Unit has been implementing genomic techniques since April 2014 and largely phased out conventional serotyping of Salmonella isolates since April 2015. It now employs Multi Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) to correlate isolates with traditional serotypes and then uses whole genome sequencing (WGS) to compare each isolate with an appropriate reference genome.