Microbial community profiles identify new indicators of waterborne pathogens

描述（由申请人提供）：污水溢出将含有共生和致病生物的复杂微生物种群引入五大湖的河流和近岸水域，五大湖拥有500多个休闲海滩，为4000多万人提供饮用水。目前流行的粪便污染检测指标大肠杆菌（E. coli）和肠球菌对宿主来源（动物或人类）缺乏特异性，通常不能很好地指示致病微生物的存在。理想情况下，新的替代指标将与人类病原体更好地相关，因此是人类健康风险的更可靠指标。我们一直在生成污水和污水污染水域的综合微生物群落概况，以便确定人类粪便污染替代指标的候选物。我们建立了微生物群落的高分辨率剖面，并确定了潜在的关键指标分类群，包括毛螺科和瘤胃球菌科的成员。来自单个城市的未经处理污水的社区概况表明，这些概况中的人类分类群特征随着时间的推移是稳定的，并且与其他人类肠道研究的概况密切相关。在这项工作中，我们将扩大我们的努力，包括美国20个地点的污水概况的地理比较。我们还将扩展我们的工作，通过创建受污染水样的概况，并利用定量PCR （qPCR）建立我们的概况中的关键分类群与致病病毒之间的统计显著关系，来验证潜在的替代指标。提议扩大我们的工作是及时的，因为我们可以通过利用作为独立资助的并行研究的一部分产生的数据来加速发现新的替代指标。最终，可在风险评估框架内使用替代指标来评估环境来源的病原体对人类健康的风险。重要的是，这项工作建立了多学科合作，以解决严重的人类健康问题。拟议的工作将在微生物生态学和遗传学、微生物学、水文学、气候学和公共卫生交叉的跨学科环境中提供培训。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Sewage overflows introduce complex microbial populations containing both commensal and pathogenic organisms into rivers and nearshore waters of the Great Lakes, which have more than 500 recreational beaches and serve as the drinking water supply for more than 40 million people. The prevailing fecal pollution detection indicators Escherichia coli (E. coli) and enterococci lack specificity for host source (animal or human) and are generally a poor indication of the presence of disease causing organisms. New alternative indicators would ideally be better correlated to human pathogens and therefore a more reliable indication of human health risk. We have been generating comprehensive microbial community profiles of sewage and sewage contaminated waters in order to identify candidates for alternative indicators of human fecal pollution. We have generated high-resolution profiles of microbial communities and have identified potential key indicator taxa including members of Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococcaceae. Community profiles of untreated sewage from a single city demonstrate the human taxa signature within these profiles is stable over time and corresponds closely to profiles from other studies of the human intestine. In this work, we will expand our efforts to include geographical comparisons of sewage profiles across 20 locations within the US. We will also extend our work on validating potential alternative indicators by creating profiles of contaminated water samples and utilizing quantitative PCR (qPCR) to establish statistically significant relationships between key taxa within our profiles and pathogenic viruses. The proposed expansion of our efforts is timely because we can accelerate discovery of new alternative indicators by drawing upon data being generated as part of independently funded concurrent studies. Ultimately, alternative indicators may be used within a risk assessment framework to evaluate human health risk from environmental sources of pathogens. Importantly, this work builds multidisciplinary collaborations to address a serious human health concern. The proposed work will provide training in an interdisciplinary environment that is at the crossroads of microbial ecology and genetics, microbiology, hydrology, climatology, and public health. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Sewage contains many pathogens that can cause waterborne illness such as gastroenteritis. Human may be exposed to waterborne pathogens through contaminated drinking water or from swimming at contaminated recreational beaches. Current methods to detect fecal pollution do not distinguish the source of pollution (human or non-human), nor do they directly indicate the presence of disease-causing organisms. Our project will employ new sequencing technologies to create a comprehensive community profile of sewage derived microorganisms, from which key members will be identified that will improve our ability to detect and track sewage contamination and waterborne disease threats.