Optimizing open data to support one health: best practices to ensure interoperability of genomic data from bacterial pathogens.

The holistic approach of One Health, which sees human, animal, plant, and environmental health as a unit, rather than discrete parts, requires not only interdisciplinary cooperation, but standardized methods for communicating and archiving data, enabling participants to easily share what they have learned and allow others to build upon their findings. Ongoing work by NCBI and the GenomeTrakr project illustrates how open data platforms can help meet the needs of federal and state regulators, public health laboratories, departments of agriculture, and universities. Here we describe how microbial pathogen surveillance can be transformed by having an open access database along with Best Practices for contributors to follow. First, we describe the open pathogen surveillance framework, hosted on the NCBI platform. We cover the current community standards for WGS quality, provide an SOP for assessing your own sequence quality and recommend QC thresholds for all submitters to follow. We then provide an overview of NCBI data submission along with step by step details. And finally, we provide curation guidance and an SOP for keeping your public data current within the database. These Best Practices can be models for other open data projects, thereby advancing the One Health goals of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) data.

Creating Best Practices for the Submission of Actionable Food and Feed Testing Data Generated in State and Local Laboratories.

Laboratory accreditation provides a level of standardization in laboratories and confidence in generated food and feed testing results. For some laboratories, ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accreditation may not be fiscally viable, or a requested test method may be out of the scope of the laboratory's accreditation. To assist laboratories for whom accreditation is not feasible, the Association of Public Health Laboratories Data Acceptance Work Group developed a white paper entitled "Best Practices for Submission of Actionable Food and Feed Testing Data Generated in State and Local Laboratories." The basic elements of a quality management system, along with other best practices that state and local food and feed testing laboratories should follow, are included in the white paper. It also covers program-specific requirements that may need to be addressed. Communication with programs and end data users is regarded as essential for establishing the reliability and accuracy of laboratory data. Following these suggested best practices can facilitate the acceptance of laboratory data, which can result in swift regulatory action and the quick removal of contaminated product from the food supply, improving public health nationally.