Lab-on-a-Paper for Point-of-Use Microbial Source Tracking

水系统中的微生物污染，包括饮用水、地面、娱乐和野生动物，是一个全球性问题。即使有运作良好的饮用水处理厂，例如苏格兰和英国的饮用水处理厂，饮用水分配系统也容易受到偶然病原体入侵的影响（来自压力损失、维修或雨水引起的污水径流），给人类健康带来高风险，并造成重大经济损失。例如，美国疾病控制中心（世界上最安全的饮用水系统之一）估计，每年有400万至3200万例急性胃肠道疾病来自公共饮用水系统。污染还影响了具有分散设施的地方分配系统，例如存在于许多低收入和中等收入国家（LMICs）以及“发达”国家（如苏格兰）的偏远地区的分配系统。在这项研究中，将开发用于在线监测水质的低成本、可部署的纸质生物传感器设备（纸上实验室）。利用围绕简单和低成本的纸质设备构建的传感器来处理水样，我们将开发快速、敏感和易于使用的测试设备，可以检测病原体的遗传标记及其来源的共同标记，这是识别饮用水中多种病原体并追踪其来源的关键能力。例如，检测人类DNA标记可以潜在地推断人类粪便污染，而动物基因（例如牛、猪等）可以帮助确定农业来源。通过部署这些便携式传感器，我们将获得有关污染模式和动态的数据，这反过来将提供不仅能够快速响应污染并在饮用水消费之前减少污染的能力，而且还可以设计新的监测系统并建立对污染病原体在环境中所采取的途径的新理解。微生物污染的检测及其在环境中的追踪和跟踪目前主要是通过分离、培养和识别已知污染物的病原体来进行的，这是一个漫长的过程，可能需要许多天的时间和广泛的技术专门知识。已经改进了新的程序，以便通过对特定遗传标记或病原体的分子检测（< 1小时）实现更快的检测，但这些程序目前需要集中的设施和熟练的人员，阻碍了它们在现场的使用。该奖学金开发的技术将允许在现场快速检测多种遗传标记。这些高度多路分析将为工业提供对污染的快速和动态响应，并识别和跟踪其来源的能力。与苏格兰水务公司合作，我们将在苏格兰实地验证这些设备。我们的密切合作将确保开发与最终用户相关，这样就可以以最小的延迟和风险完成转化为实际使用。这将有可能实现“可持续社区和可持续家园”，这是苏格兰水务公司针对小型农村社区的一项倡议，在苏格兰尤为重要，同时也为国际增长提供了机会。除了资源丰富的农村社区，分散的供水系统也存在于低收入和中等收入国家。通过与非政府组织的互动，我们将致力于探索该奖学金开发的技术对全球更广泛社区的影响。未来，我们的生物技术平台还将在更广泛的环境（如农业过程）中实现来源跟踪和监测，包括抗菌素耐药性，从而为解决维持健康人口所面临的挑战提供基石，这是英国工业战略的一个关键环节。

Water contamination with microbial organisms in water systems, including drinking, ground, recreational, and wildlife, is a global issue. Even with well-operated drinking-water treatment plants, such as those available in Scotland and the UK, drinking water distribution systems are vulnerable to episodic pathogen intrusion (from pressure losses, repairs or rain-induced run-off of dirty water), presenting high risks to human health and significant economic losses. For example the Centre for Disease Control in the United States (one of the safest drinking water systems in the world) estimate that there are 4-32 million cases of acute gastrointestinal illness per year from public drinking water systems. Contamination is also impacting local distribution systems with decentralised facilities, such as those present in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) as well as remote areas of 'developed' countries (such as Scotland). In this Fellowship, low-cost, deployable paper-based biosensor devices (lab-on-a-paper) will be developed for the online monitoring of water quality. Using sensors built around simple and low-cost paper-based devices to process water samples, we will develop rapid, sensitive and easy-to-use testing devices that can detect genetic markers of pathogens, along with co-markers of their origins, a key capability to identify multiple pathogens in drinking water and track their source. For example, the detection of human DNA markers could potentially infer a human faecal contamination, while animal genes (e.g. cattle, pig, etc...) could help identify agricultural sources. By deploying these portable sensors, we will obtain data on contamination patterns and dynamics, which in turn will provide the ability to not only rapidly respond to the contamination and curtail it before consumption of drinking water, but also design new surveillance systems and build new understandings of the pathways taken by the contaminating pathogens in the environment. The detection of microbial contamination together with its tracing and tracking in the environment is currently performed mainly by isolating, culturing and identifying the pathogens against known contaminants, through a long process that can take many days and extensive technical expertise. New procedures have been improved to enable faster testing via the molecular detection of specific genetic markers or the pathogens (< 1 hour), but these currently require centralised facilities and skilled personnel, preventing their use in the field. The technologies developed in this Fellowship will allow the detection of multiple genetic markers rapidly, in the field. These highly multiplexed assays will provide the capability for industry to provide a rapid and dynamic response to a contamination, and to identify and track its source.Working with Scottish Water, we will validate the devices in the field in Scotland. Our close collaboration will ensure that the developments are relevant to the end-users, such that the translation into practical use can be accomplished with minimal delay and risk. This will have the potential to enable "sustainable communities and sustainable homes", an initiative of Scottish Water for small rural communities which is particularly important in Scotland as well as affording opportunities for growth internationally. Beyond rural communities in high-resources settings, decentralised water systems are also present in low and middle-income countries. Through interactions with NGOs, we will aim to explore the impact of the technologies developed in this Fellowship in the wider community, globally. In future, our biotechnological platform will also enable source tracking and monitoring in the wider environment (e.g. agricultural processes), including antimicrobial resistance, thus providing a cornerstone in solving challenges arising to maintain a healthy population, a key strand of the UK Industrial Strategy.