You are here:
Monitoring Your Building Water: implementing metagenomic approaches to understand the water microbiome
Citation:
Gomez-Alvarez, V., L. Boczek, AND R. Revetta. Monitoring Your Building Water: implementing metagenomic approaches to understand the water microbiome. ASM Conference on Rapid Applied Microbial Next-Generation Sequencing and Bioinformatic Pipelines (NGS), Cincinnati, OH, December 07 - 11, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
Research efforts focus on evaluating the interplay between water quality parameters, microbial communities, and opportunistic pathogens in drinking water systems utilizing various engineering designs and water management practices. The use of molecular approaches (e.g. next generation sequencing) in this research effort will help to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the microbial ecology in drinking water systems.
Description:
The emergence and development of next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS) has made the analysis of the water microbiome more accessible and opens new perspectives in microbial ecology studies. NGS technology has the potential to provide information about the diversity and functional profile of the microbial population, underlying mechanisms involved in microbial persistence and could identify and indicate the enrichment of core/accessory genes directly associated with adaptations to the environment. The current study focused on the monitoring of the water quality and microbiome from premise plumbing (PP) systems in a 40-year-old large building supplied with treated chlorinated water with a main and secondary hot water network. In particular, we investigated the population of Legionella pneumophila, a Gram-negative bacterium and major causative agent of Legionnaires’ disease. Public health data shows that a significant fraction of the nation’s waterborne disease outbreaks is attributable to PP systems. The water quality was found to deteriorate due to stagnation and continuous temperature monitoring revealed inconsistent flow patterns in the hot water system, which produced temperature zones that differed significantly from the hot water tank. Our results indicate a highly dynamic and diverse microbial community. Furthermore, a pangenome approach indicates the evidence of spatial structure of the L. pneumophila population throughout locations and within their respective drinking water systems in large occupational buildings. A comprehensive understanding of microbial community will improve the success of the implementation of water management programs to reduce the potential risk associated with the water microbiome.