Research & Related Other Project Information Project Summary/Abstract Component: Overall The Food & Drug Protection Division (FDPD) within the North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (NCDA&CS) will support a nationally integrated and prevention-focused food and feed safety system by increasing sample testing activities, making data available to state and federal partners, and building and deploying new analytical capabilities. The FDPD Laboratory has partnered with FDPD’s regulatory program offices (the FDPD Food Program and FDPD Feed Program) to identify commodity-hazard pairs of national and state significance and developed surveillance programs to better characterize the risks these commodity-hazard pairs pose to public health and consumer confidence. Because the FDPD Food and Feed Programs have fully implemented the relevant regulatory program standards (Manufactured Food Regulatory Program Standards and Animal Feed Regulatory Program Standards) and all proposed laboratory analyses are included in FDPD Laboratory’s scope of ISO 17025 accreditation, FDPD is confident that all data submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be accurate, precise, and actionable. In addition to expanding sample testing, FDPD will work with FDA to develop testing capabilities in order to increase national testing capacity. FDPD proposes development of whole genome sequencing capabilities in year 1 and participation in method development and validation activities in later years.