Application of advanced genomic tools in food safety rapid diagnostics: challenges and opportunities

The increasing adoption of genomics and sequencing-based approaches to detect foodborne pathogens has led to a new direction in food safety diagnostics. Sequencing technologies such as next-generation sequencing are used to confirm the taxonomic hierarchy and revision, describe a novel species, genome construction, prediction of microbial functions, risk assessment, identify the transmission dynamics, and conduct the routine surveillance of foodborne pathogens. Growing implementation of these culture-independent diagnostics tools by several public health, clinical, governmental, and industrial entities to replace the slow and labor-intensive culture -dependent methods underscores the impact of sequencing -based methods. This review focuses on the emerging computational genomics and bioinformatics approaches for rapid detection and characterization of foodborne pathogens to improve the resolution of molecular diagnostics.