Microbial community profiles identify new indicators of waterborne pathogens

描述(申请人提供)：污水溢出将含有共生和病原体的复杂微生物种群引入五大湖的河流和近岸水域，这些水域拥有500多个娱乐海滩，是4000多万人的饮用水供应。目前流行的粪便污染检测指标大肠杆菌和肠球菌缺乏宿主来源(动物或人类)的特异性，通常不能很好地指示致病微生物的存在。理想情况下，新的替代指标将更好地与人类病原体相关，因此是更可靠的人类健康风险指标。我们一直在制作污水和污水污染水的全面微生物群落概况，以确定替代人类排泄物污染指标的候选者。我们已经生成了微生物群落的高分辨率剖面，并确定了潜在的关键指示分类群，包括乳螺科和反刍球菌科的成员。来自单个城市的未经处理污水的社区概况表明，这些概况中的人类类群特征随着时间的推移是稳定的，与其他人体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，包括对美国20个地点的污水剖面进行地理比较。我们还将扩大我们验证潜在替代指标的工作，方法是创建受污染水样的剖面，并利用定量聚合酶链式反应(QPCR)在我们剖面内的关键分类群与致病病毒之间建立具有统计学意义的关系。提议扩大我们的努力是及时的，因为我们可以通过利用作为独立资助的同时研究的一部分而产生的数据，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病原体来源对人类健康的风险。重要的是，这项工作建立了多学科合作，以解决一个严重的人类健康问题。拟议的工作将在处于微生物生态学和遗传学、微生物学、水文学、气候学和公共卫生的十字路口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.