Development of a Genomic Framework for Quality Assessment of Live Microbial Supplements

Dr. Carmen Tartera is a research microbiologist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the Center of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She initially worked on virulence and environmental regulation of Shiga toxin in E. coli. Since 2015, she has been working on live microbial supplements, focusing on generating analytical pipelines to determine label compliance and potential adulteration in these products using Next Generation Sequencing. In this talk, she will provide a better understanding of the contents of foods that contain live microbes, the accuracy of their label, and the ability to identify potential contaminants and low-level constituents using Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) analysis.