Discipline B Track 3: Animal Food Product Testing Project Summary The U.S. FDA is the agency responsible for assuring the safety of animal food within the U.S. The purpose of this project is for grant recipients to assist in improving surveillance programs through chemical testing of animal food products. As California’s state veterinary diagnostic laboratory, the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory (CAHFS) is set to help meet the project goals. CAHFS promotes animal food protection by working in partnership with state regulatory agencies that have the responsibility for enforcing animal food safety regulations. The CAHFS Toxicology Section has committed to enter into a contractual agreement with the California Department of Agriculture (CDFA) Commercial Feed Regulatory Program (CFRP) to begin providing analytical services for their feed and food safety program in July of this year. CDFA administers the Animal Feed Regulatory Program Standards (AFRPS) for the State of California. Once a contract is in place, CAHFS will be the primary servicing laboratory for the safety testing of manufactured animal food within the State of California. While the CDFA CFRP program is new to CAHFS, we anticipate the seamless integration of regulatory feed testing into our diagnostic testing workload since many of the needed feed testing SOPs are already in place. This grant will enhance our regulatory testing while improving the FDA’s surveillance of the animal food system in one of the country’s largest agricultural states We plan to collect 100 dairy cattle feed samples consisting of whole corn and whole cottonseed. Half of those samples will be tested for mycotoxins, the other half for essential and non-essential metals. The methods we plan on using include a mycotoxin screen developed by FDA-CFSAN personnel (Zhang et. al.) and the official FDA method CHE.0009 for metals. Violative or “cannot-rule-out” CRO mycotoxin levels will be determined by the guidance levels published in the FDA’s CVM Annual Report on Mycotoxins in Animal Food Report for Fiscal Year 2016 (FY16). The essential and non-essential metal maximum tolerable concentrations (MTC) published by the National Research Council in “Mineral Tolerance of Animals” 2nd Ed., 2005 will be used to guide regulatory actions. Results exceeding these guidelines will be reported to the FDA as required by this grant. We believe that we will be able to accommodate larger sample numbers in this testing track in years 2 through 5 of this FERN grant period. We also expect to have additional sample collection agreements in place that will allow us to analyze additional commodity/hazard pairings.