Division of Animal and Food Microbiology

Biography

Dr. Errol Strain joined the Division of Animal and Food Microbiology in the Office of Research at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine in 2019 where he is responsible for bioinformatic analysis of drug-resistant pathogens for the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System.  From 2010 to 2018 he was the Supervisor for the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Staff in the Office of Analytics and Outreach at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition where he helped to create bioinformatics pipelines and workflows for the GenomeTrakr program. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from Purdue University in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from North Carolina State University in 2006. Dr. Strain’s research at the FDA has focused on the application of genomic methods for surveillance and prediction of antimicrobial resistance in foodborne bacterial pathogens.

Research

1. Whole-Genome Sequence (WGS) based methods for predicting minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) Salmonella, E. coli, and Campylobacter
2. Development of novel bioinformatic technologies for detection and tracking emerging resistance genes
3. Improved genomic subtyping techniques for traceback and foodborne outbreaks.

Select Publications

Ottesen A, Ramachandran P, Reed E, Gu G, Gorham S, Ducharme D, Newell M, Rideout S, Turini T, Hill T, Strain E, Brown EW, Metagenome tracking biogeographic agroecology: Phytobiota of tomatoes from Virginia, Maryland, California, and North Carolina, Food Microbiology, 2018, ISSN 0740-0020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fm.2018.12.001

Wang YU, Pettengill JB, Pightling A, Timme R, Allard M, Strain E, Rand H. Genetic Diversity of Salmonella and Listeria Isolates from Food Facilities. J Food Prot. 2018 Dec;81(12):2082-2089. doi: 10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-18-093. PubMed PMID: 30485763.

Pightling AW, Pettengill JB, Luo Y, Baugher JD, Rand H, Strain E. Interpreting Whole-Genome Sequence Analyses of Foodborne Bacteria for Regulatory Applications and Outbreak Investigations. Front Microbiol. 2018 Jul 10;9:1482. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.01482. eCollection 2018. PubMed PMID:30042741; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6048267.

Ramachandran P, Reed E, Commichaux S, Strain E, Depaola A,  Rikard  S,  Ottesen  A. Characterization of the Microbiota of Oyster Larvae (Crassostrea virginica) and Tank Water from an Aquaculture System with High and Low Larval Survival Rates. Genome Announc. 2018 Jun 21;6(25). pii: e00597-18. doi: 10.1128/genomeA.00597-18. PubMed PMID: 29930077; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6013593.

Timme RE, Rand H, Sanchez Leon M, Hoffmann M, Strain E, Allard M, Roberson D, Baugher JD. GenomeTrakr proficiency testing for foodborne pathogen surveillance: an exercise from 2015.
Microb doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000185. Epub 2018 Jun 15. PubMed PMID: 29906258; ubMed Central PMCID: PMC6113870.