AWWA WQTC62480

Microbial source tracking (MST) technologies offer the potential to identify the source(s) of fecal 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 assumption that there is a correlation between specific microorganisms (species, types, strains) and their host animals. There are numerous examples of case studies demonstrating 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 biological targets, phenotypic and genotypic techniques, culture-dependent and independent methods, and library-dependent and independent methods. Chemical detection methods assume an exclusively anthropogenic source for these compounds. Molecular methods are potentially powerful tools that can discriminate between bacteria at the species and subspecies levels. Some of these methods use bacterial species specific to particular animal hosts, while others focus on sub-typing particular species on the assumption that host-adapted strains can be identified. Library-based methods potentially have the highest host discriminatory resolution but data management and interpretation can become problematic with large libraries. Includes 12 references, table, figure.