show Abstracthide AbstractThe food and water safety pilot project is a comprehensive strategy that integrates multidisciplinary components from diverse federal science sources to address two main goals. The first is to enhance food and water safety by developing genomics-based methods for pathogen isolation, detection and characterisation. The second goal is to develop a federally integrated system to manage, store and provide open access to genomic data related to food and water borne pathogens. The model organisms for this study are Shiga-toxin Producing Escherchia coli (STEC) and Salmonella Enteritidis from Environmental, animal husbandry, food samples, and medical isolates.