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Date: July 20, 2000
From: Susan Alpert, MD, Ph.D.
Director, Food Safety Initiative
Subject: Intramural Grant Awards for Technical Support
To: CFSAN Office Directors
It is my pleasure to announce this year's recipients of Intramural Grant Awards for Technical Support. To all of the applicants, I express my appreciation for your interest and participation. Each of this year's submissions was of superior scientific quality and reflects the expertise of our scientific staff and their creative efforts. I encourage all of our scientific staff who are seeking to fund short-term additional technical support positions for FSI related research to participate in this effort when it is again offered. I join with the rest of the FSI staff in congratulating this year's recipients for a job well done.
Members of the primary review panel:
Kelly Bunning, Bob Bracket, John Newland and Dennis Kopecko.
Members of the secondary review panel:
Art Miller, Sam Page and Bob Buchanan
Principal Investigator: Y.S. Carol Shieh, Ph.D.
Title: Development of an instantaneous fluorescence assay to detect PCR-amplified Norwalk-like virus and Hepatitis A virus in seafood.
Objective: Development of a accurate, fast, simple and inexpensive one-step detection assay for screening viruses in seafood for transfer to the regulatory/field labs. Method will use an instantaneous fluorescence assay to replace classic molecular detection of PCR products by agarose gel, Southern blotting, nucleic acid hybridization and colorimetric visualization.
Principal Investigator: Biswendu Goswami, Ph.D.
Title: Profile of gene expression in Hepatitis A virus infected cells.
Objective: Develop improved detection and sub-typing methods for the detection of viral pathogens (HAV and NLV) in support of the development of food safety guidance and policies, and to contribute to surveillance, outbreak and traceback activities.
Principal Investigator: Robert Hall, Ph.D.
Title: Optimizing strand displacement amplification (SDA) for pathogen detection and quantification in the field.
Objective: To transfer SDA and fluorescence polarization (FP) technology to the field labs by optimizing the protocol initially using E. coli O157:H7 present in a variety of food materials.
Principal Investigator: Douglas Park, Ph.D.
Title: Determination of mutagenic potentials in milk from lactating dairy cows fed aflatoxin-containing, aflatoxin-decontaminated, and aflatoxin-free feed.
Objective: Determine the efficacy of reducing aflatoxin contamination levels in corn and cottonseed using the ammonia atmospheric pressure/ambient temperature zone treatments, and determine relative mutagenic potentials of aflatoxin decontamination by-products in milk from lactating dairy cows fed ammonia and ozone treated aflatoxin-contaminated feed rations.
Principal Investigator: Angelo DePaola, Ph.D.
Title: Pathogen concentration from food and environmental samples for “real time” detection.
Objective: To develop simple reliable pathogen concentration procedures for food and environmental samples to allow the application of a variety of pathogen detection and enumeration methods based on; culturing; PCR amplification; flow cytometry; and, biosensors/surface-enhancing Raman scattering.
Principal Investigator: Steven Plakas, Ph.D.
Title: Characterization of pathogenic aquatic eucaryotes and their toxins.
Objective: Characterize the absorption, metabolism, and elimination of marine toxins in finfish and shellfish. Preliminary data suggests 60-80% of total toxicity present in shellfish is undetectable by the mouse bioassay and the toxic metabolites remain unidentified. For brevetoxins, development of more definitive and efficient alternatives to the mouse bioassay are being sought through further characterization of toxin disposition in shellfish.
Hypertext updated by bap/dav 2001-OCT-02