UC Davis' fledgling genetics lab in Sacramento announced its first major research project Thursday, a massive study of the DNA of salmonella and other bacteria linked to foodborne illnesses.

The five-year project could pay economic dividends for the university and the region. Besides boosting the visibility of the 10-month-old lab, it could enhance Sacramento's modest credentials as a life-sciences hub.

"This is a game-changer, and it's happening right there in Sacramento," said Paul Zavitsanos of Agilent Technologies Inc., the $6 billion-a-year Silicon Valley scientific-instrument maker that's helping fund the project.

Researchers plan to sequence, or map, the genes of 100,000 infectious microorganisms. The work, known as the 100K Genome Project, will be done at the new BGI@UCDavis genomics lab, on the university's medical complex in Sacramento.

"It will raise the profile of the BGI@UCDavis facility tremendously," said Bart Weimer, a university veterinarian and co-director of the facility. He said preliminary work on the project actually began in March.

The genetics lab, a collaboration with world-renowned Chinese research institute BGI, employs just three workers, but that will grow. Weimer plans to hire six assistants for the food-safety project alone, and eventually the facility is expected to employ 200 or more workers.

Community leaders hope it could spawn new companies and provide a spark for the region's smallish life-sciences industry, which has struggled to gain traction.

The facility is already showing up on radar screens in the genetics world.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a partner in the food-safety project, said the UC Davis facility was chosen partly because of sheer horsepower. While it took the FDA three years to sequence the genes of 500 strains of salmonella, the Sacramento lab is expected to map 100,000 different pathogens in five years.

"It has a substantial ability to do sequencing," said Steven Musser, director of the FDA's office of regulatory science for food safety.

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UC Davis lab to study bacteria linked to food-borne illnesses

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