Pathogen testing is currently conducted at more than 10,000 locations globally to ensure the safety of food, beverages, and pharmaceutical products. Fast, accurate identification of pathogens can improve consumer protection while reducing industry costs.

Pharmaceutical companies perform rigorous testing throughout manufacture including analysis of raw materials, in-process goods, and finished products to ensure sterility before release to the public.

In order to identify the route of contamination, bacterial pathogens must be typed to the strain level. With current technology, identification at the strain level involves a time consuming, two-step process. First, species-level identification of bacterial pathogen contamination can be achieved directly from an enrichment broth into which the food sample has been placed. However, after bacterial identification, strain typing of the bacterial contaminant then takes an additional 2-3 days, or longer. GSS can perform bacterial strain identification directly, eliminating many hands-on steps and providing actionable information within three hours, days faster than the existing approaches.