Full Description

Microbial source tracking (MST) technologies offer the potential to identify the source(s) offecal contamination in water and thereby improve the management of wastewater discharges,agricultural run-off, and source water protection. The MST approach is based on the assumptionthat there is a correlation between specific microorganisms (species, types, strains) and their hostanimals. There are numerous examples of case studiesdemonstrating the utility of some MST methods and their use in the decision making process.However, many methods have been proposed for MST, encompassing chemical and biologicaltargets, phenotypic and genotypic techniques, culture-dependent and independent methods, andlibrary-dependent and independent methods. Chemical detection methods assume anexclusively anthropogenic source for these compounds. Molecular methods are potentiallypowerful tools that can discriminate between bacteria at the species and subspecies levels. Someof these methods use bacterial species specific to particular animal hosts, while others focus onsub-typing particular species on the assumption that host-adapted strains can be identified.Library-based methods potentially have the highest host discriminatory resolution but datamanagement and interpretation can become problematic with large libraries. Includes 12 references, table, figure.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 11/01/2005 Number of Pages: 9File Size: 1 file , 250 KB