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(English)Manuscript (preprint) (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
Urban sewer systems consist of wastewater and stormwater sewers, of which typically only
the wastewater is processed before being discharged. Occasionally, misconnections or
damages in the network occur, resulting in wastewater entering the stormwater system and
being discharged without prior processing. Cultivation of faecal indicator bacteria, such as
Escherichia coli (E. coli), is the current standard for tracing wastewater contamination. This
method is cheap but cannot be employed in the field and is characterised by its limited
specificity. Here, we compared the E. coli culturing approach with two different DNA
sequencing-based methodologies (i.e., 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing on the Illumina
MiSeq platform and shotgun metagenomic sequencing on an Oxford Nanopore MinIOn
device), analysing 73 stormwater samples collected throughout the Stockholm city areas.
High correlations were obtained between E. coli culturing counts and frequencies of human
gut microbiome sequencing reads (via amplicon sequencing), indicating that E. coli is indeed
a good indicator of faecal contamination. In contrast to E.coli culturing, amplicon sequencing
could, however, further distinguish between two different sources of contamination in an
area, where misconnections in the stormwater system were later on detected. Shotgun
metagenomic sequencing on a subset of the samples using the portable Oxford Nanopore
MinION real-time sequencing device correlated well with the amplicon sequencing data. In
summary, this study shows that DNA sequencing allows distinguishing different
contamination sources in stormwater systems and demonstrates the potential of using a
portable sequencing device in the field for tracking faecal contamination.
Keywords
stormwater, metabarcoding, oxford nanopore, illumina, microbial community, source tracking
National Category
Environmental Engineering Civil Engineering
Research subject
Biotechnology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-204668 (URN)
Note
QC 20170403
2017-03-302017-03-302022-10-24Bibliographically approved