Whole Genome Sequencing for Food Safety: Opportunities, Benefits and Challenges

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is increasingly used by public health and regulatory agencies to detect foodborne disease outbreaks, identify outbreak sources, and, less commonly, to assess food industry’s regulatory compliance status. WGS application appears most prevalent in US, Canada, many parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, as compared to other countries and specifically most low and middle income countries. The use of WGS by the food industry is more limited and typically focuses on very specific applications where benefits have been determined to outweigh potential risks of WGS use, including regulatory, legal and reputational risks due to use and sharing of WGS data and attribution of WGS data to a specific firm. Broader industry adoption is further hampered by hurdles such as lack of trained personnel to properly interpret WGS findings and/or the ability to put the findings into context of enterprise risk. Ultimately, global public health will benefit from the use of WGS and the sharing of normalized and standardized data provided that (i) the risks to the private sector can be appropriately and reasonably identified and mitigated and that (ii) global WGS infrastructure is enhanced and further harmonized.