Improve the ID of the Fecal Contaminate with MST

The figure shows three different tables each one showing the standardized MST results of three different beach locations. Table 3 is for St. Clair Shores Memorial Park Beach. Table 4 is for Walter and Mary Burke Park Beach. Table 5 is for Lake St. Clair Metropark Beach.

Recreational water quality monitoring or RWQM is used to reduce the risk of being exposed to waterborne pathogens from fecal contamination. But a traditional RWQM is unable to distinguish between human or nonhuman fecal contamination. MTS or microbial source tracking is a method to improve RWQM that can identify the source of fecal contamination but when more than one target is present it will not be possible to determine the primary source of the fecal contamination. Jamison et al. (2022) have provided this study to aim for the standardization and normalization of MST by relating the copies of gene targets to that of the amount of fecal matter present with the help of ddPCR analysis, dry weight equivalence, and standard curve generation. Fecal samples were collected from five public beaches and the samples consisted of humans, gull and two Canadian geese fecal matter. The data concluded that at two of the five beaches had two targets detected the primary fecal contamination being geese for one beach and gull for the other, one beach only detected human feces, and one beach did not detect multiple targets. MTS can be applied to RWQM projects to help identify nonhuman fecal contamination.

Original article:

Jamison, M. N., Hart, J. J., & Szlag, D. C. (2022) Improving the Identification of Fecal Contamination in Recreational Water through the Standardization and Normalization of Microbial Source Tracking. ACS EST Water, 2305-2311.