Applied research at the Wadsworth Center encompasses a wide variety of highly collaborative activities.  Staff are committed to perform extensive research to develop and apply new methods and technologies to detect and characterize human diseases, environmental analytes, and infectious disease pathogens.  While focused on improving public health, this research often translates to clinical applications, which serve to fill gaps where commercial products and services are unavailable.  Some examples in infectious diseases include application of molecular methods to detect cases of botulism, tuberculosis, pertussis and HIV-2.  Clinical research is also aimed to improve methods for assessing genetic relatedness among microbes, which is essential to public health outbreak investigations and improving surveillance.  In Newborn Screening, a major focus is on refining existing methods or developing new methods to screen for additional conditions and to reduce the number of false positive results.  In environmental testing the focus is on expanding our capabilities in biomonitoring and to better detect new and existing contaminants.