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Funded
Project.

A Novel Approach for the Simple and Rapid Detection of Water Associated Microbial Health Risks from Faecal Contamination

A Novel Approach for the Simple and Rapid Detection of Water Associated Microbial Health Risks from...

Main application:
TU Wien

Scientific management:
Georg Reischer (TU Wien)

Project partner:
Andreas Farnleitner (TU Wien)

Research field:
Medizinische Biotechnologie, Wasser

Project-ID: LS13-020
Project start: 01. January 2015
Runtime: 36 months / finished
Funding amount: € 246.000,00

Brief summary

Unsafe water and inappropriate sanitation measures, together with malnutrition, unsafe sex, alcohol abuse and hypertension, belong to the top health risks. Accordingly to importance, safe drinking water has recently been defined as human right and belongs to one of the millennium development goals of the United Nations. For almost one billion people, this goal has not been achieved up to now. Faecal material frequently contains intestinal pathogens in significant numbers and is thus considered of paramount importance as a contaminating agent of water. Sensitive, cheap, reliable and straightforward methods for the detection and monitoring of microbial faecal contamination of water are thus considered one of the outstanding elements, contributing to improved and target-oriented water safety management. Up to now, such methods are not available. For more than a century, determination of microbial faecal pollution has been heavily relying on the selective growth of standard faecal indicator bacteria, such as Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci. The application of these indicators has been increasingly subjected to severe criticism during the last decades, as time of analysis is more than a working day, these organisms may originate from non-intestinal environments, occur in relative low abundance, and its positive indication does not give any information on the source of contamination. Molecular direct detection of highly abundant genetic intestinal microbial targets - such as for Bacteroidetes populations - has recently been introduced as a sensitive and intelligent way of water quality testing and holds great promise to revolutionise future water quality testing. The quantification of genetic Bacteroidetes markers allows the detection of total faecal pollution levels and its concurrent allocation of contributing sources (e.g. human or animal faecal pollution) to make a direct link to the potential health risk of a water sample. However, there has been one critical limitation in the past: the need for sophisticated equipment and skilled laboratory stuff to determine the particular DNA sequences of indicator organisms.
During the last decade different so called “isothermal amplification techniques” for a simple detection of DNA have been developed with the focus to avoid any expensive laboratory equipment for analysis. Based on these approaches in combination with an innovative enrichment step we will develop a rapid test system for i) the total faecal pollution and ii) for faecal pollution of either human or animal origin. The here developed tests will be a great step towards a rapid on-site testing for the assessment of the health risk caused by the intake of water.

Keywords:
DNA, water, aptamer, Bacteroidetes, isothermal amplification, indicator organisms

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