Project Abstract Virginia Tech Animal Laboratory Services (ViTALS) at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine (VMCVM) has been a member of the FDA CVM Vet-LIRN laboratory network since 2012. With previous infrastructure funding, ViTALS was able to conduct staff training and expansion of the molecular diagnostics section to comply with the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians (AAVLD) requirements for accreditation. ViTALS was granted accreditation in 2017. The expertise of the faculty and staff along with the highly organized and well established facility have served as an integral component of the network. ViTALS encompasses six units including anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, clinical microbiology, molecular diagnostics, clinical immunology, and clinical parasitology. ViTALS has experience and expertise in running GLP studies and is capable of providing technical skill and support for ongoing surveillance or outbreak testing. In addition, ViTALS has expertise in deep sequencing, in particular long read technologies, which have been employed for bacterial, viral and parasitic whole genome sequencing as well as pathogen discovery with shotgun metagenomics.