Intro to Gen-FS: An overview of the Genomics for Food and Feed Safety Collaboration

Apr 30, 2026 (2:00 PM - 3:30 PM Eastern Time)

Webinar Description

Gen-FS, the Interagency Collaboration on Genomics for Food and Feed Safety, unites several federal agencies: CDC, FDA, NIH-NLM-NCBI, USDA FSIS, APHIS, and ARS, alongside state public health laboratories and academic partners, to advance genomics-based food safety surveillance. As whole genome sequencing and related technologies become standard tools in pathogen detection and outbreak investigation, understanding how Gen-FS coordinates methods, validates sequencing approaches, and standardizes data will benefit the broader food safety community. This webinar will introduce participants to the structure, mission, and core activities of Gen-FS, with a focus on how publicly available genomic surveillance data is generated, quality-assured, and made accessible. Attendees will gain foundational knowledge to better utilize Gen-FS resources in research, regulatory, and applied food safety contexts. This webinar will be followed up by a half-symposia session focused on recent advances in Gen-FS at the 2026 IAFP Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the structure and mission of Gen-FS, including the roles of participating federal agencies and collaborating partners such as state public health laboratories and academic institutions.

2. Explain how Gen-FS coordinates genomics methods and data standards, including efforts to improve sequence data quality and support machine-readable contextual data across clinical, food, and environmental samples.

3. Identify key Gen-FS resources such as NCBI Pathogen Detection and describe how these can be accessed and applied by academia, third-party laboratories, food production companies, and government scientists.