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ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING OF POLLUTED WATERS USING SOURCE TRACKING MOLECULAR TOOLS: LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE NEEDS
Citation:
SANTO-DOMINGO, J. W., J. LU, O. C. SHANKS, C. A. KELTY, R. LAMENDELLA, AND D. B. OERTHER. ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING OF POLLUTED WATERS USING SOURCE TRACKING MOLECULAR TOOLS: LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE NEEDS. Presented at 35th Annual Fall Conference, Water Management Association of Ohio, Columbus, OH, November 15 - 16, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public
Description:
Different approaches have been used to identify fecal pollution sources in water samples. Early on, the fecal coliforms - fecal streptococci ratio was proposed as a method that could discriminate between human and animal contamination. Several studies showed that the latter approach was not reliable and therefore could not be used for fecal source identification. More recently, a number of microbial source tracking (MST) methods have been suggested to determine the type of animals implicated in fecal water pollution. Several criteria need to be met in order for any given MST method to be useful at identifying the sources of pollution in field studies. The use of library independent methods (LIMs) is becoming increasingly popular by MST researchers because most methods do not depend on the cultivation of bacterial indicators and because the detection of genetic markers can be performed directly from water DNA extracts. The advantages and limitations of molecular methods as well as results from our laboratory on the evaluation of current and novel genetic markers will be discussed in this seminar. Moreover, we will propose the need for simultaneous monitoring of host-specific markers, fecal indicators, and pathogens as necessary in order to develop microbial risk assessment models associated with different sources of fecal pollution.