Got pathogens?

Share your samples with FDA to help support MCM development

Many infectious diseases have similar signs and symptoms, making it challenging for healthcare providers to quickly identify the disease-causing agent. Doctors must often use multiple test methods to reveal the particular microbe causing illness, and ultimately determine the best treatment for patients.

Today, next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology could accomplish in a single test what might have required several different tests in the past. In other words, labs would be able to run diagnostic tests without knowing what disease(s) to test for.

However, before labs can conduct this type of test, the infrastructure to support NGS must be developed, including reference databases of microbial genomes. Both industry and FDA need these databases to help advance new medical countermeasures (MCMs)—diagnostics in particular—for emerging biothreats, including Ebola and Zika.

The FDA Database for Reference Grade Microbial Sequences (FDA-ARGOS) generates quality-controlled microbial reference genomes for diagnostic use, and makes them freely available in a public database.

Community stakeholders: We need your samples.

The FDA-ARGOS team and collaborators are specifically searching for unique, hard-to-source microbes such as biothreat organisms, emerging pathogens, and clinically significant bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic genomes. We aim to collect sequence information for a minimum of 5 isolates per species. Most-wanted organism list (PDF, 93 KB)