Course on genomic epidemiology of foodborne pathogens

With an estimated 9.4 million cases of foodborne illness occurring on a yearly basis in the U.S. alone, there is an urgent need for improved approaches to foodborne outbreak investigations to effectively limit or prevent such events. Modern, genomics-based tools have become invaluable working towards this goal, and can be applied beyond detection and tracking of pathogens along the food supply chain, to better understand fundamental biological functions of microorganism in agricultural and food systems.

Being able to draw epidemiologically and biologically meaningful information from an ever-growing amount of publicly available genomic sequencing data is critical for the advancement of foodborne pathogen surveillance, food safety and public health, and is valuable also in other fields that benefit from comparative genomics. The goal of this course is to equip students of food, agricultural and life sciences with epidemiological and bioinformatics skills needed for comparative genomics and interpretation of whole genome sequencing data for foodborne outbreak investigation and beyond. Students will work on data from a real-life outbreak case.