Project Abstract The University of Illinois (UI) Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (VDL) is fully accredited by the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians (AAVLD) as a full service laboratory for all animal species. The UI VDL’s expertise includes Microbiology, Food Safety Microbiology, Virology, Histology, Pathology, Clinical Pathology, Zoo Pathology, Molecular Diagnostics, Immunology, and Wildlife Epidemiology. The UI VDL has extensive experience in providing diagnostic services and analytical data for infectious diseases in animals as well as animal products for federal and state regulatory agencies. As one of Vet-LIRN laboratories, UI VDL participates iSeq WGS project for Salmonella and E.coli and leads iSeq WGS project for Listeria monocytogenes. Continued improvement of next generation sequencing (NGS) procedures are critically important and help to improve the capacity of Vet-LIRN laboratories for outbreak investigations in animals. This proposal is to request funding to purchase an automated NGS Library Prep Workstation to significantly increase our testing capacity for routine case investigation and surveillance coordinated by Vet-LIRN.