Recently, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued a white paper titled: “Current and Future Development and Use of Molecular Subtyping by USDA-FSIS.” The potential for regulatory action based on subtyping of pathogens is guaranteed to keep folks like me awake at night.
Simply put, subtyping analyzes certain portions of an organism’s DNA so as to permit one to discriminate within a common species. There are currently two primary subtyping methods.