Operating under Alberta Precision Laboratories (APL) and based at two sites this service has a scope of approximately 2 million tests per year including environmental water testing (drinking water and recreational water), enteric disease related testing for outbreak investigation, immunity testing including prenatal testing, mycobacteriology, mycology, parasitology, transplant virology, zoonotic diseases, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, hepatitis viruses, vaccine preventable diseases and bioterrorism related testing.

The service provides clinical and public health microbiology testing and diagnostic algorithms, employing state-of-the-art methodologies including advanced molecular and genomics methods.

Also under the responsibility of ProvLab is the acute care clinical microbiology testing for the University of Alberta Hospital and the only containment level 3 laboratory in the province used for clinical diagnostic purposes.

In addition staff respond to outbreaks, emerging issues and emergency response situations as the need arises.

The trend in clinical microbiology continues to include multi-pathogen detection arrays, point-of-care rapid testing, as well as whole genome sequencing / genomics approaches to pathogen characterization. ProvLab is integrally involved in research for all of these issues.

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