Construction of a Low-cost Mobile Incubator for Field and Laboratory Use

Incubators are essential for a range of culture-based microbial methods, such as membrane filtration followed by cultivation for assessing drinking water ...

EAWAG

Shower hoses offer an excellent bacterial growth environment in close proximity to a critical end-user exposure route within building drinking water plumbing. However, the health risks associated with and processes underlying the development of biofilms in shower hoses are poorly studied. In a global survey, biofilms from 78 shower hoses from 11 countries were characterized in terms of cell concentration (4.1 × 10-5.8 × 10 cells/cm), metal accumulation (including iron, lead, and copper), and microbiome composition (including presence of potential opportunistic pathogens). In countries using disinfectant, biofilms had on average lower cell concentrations and diversity. Metal accumulation (up to 5 μg-Fe/cm, 75 ng-Pb/cm, and 460 ng-Cu/cm) seemed to be partially responsible for discoloration in biofilms, and likely originated from other pipes upstream in the building. While some genera that may contain potential opportunistic pathogens (Legionella, detected in 21/78 shower hoses) were positively correlated with biofilm cell concentration, others (Mycobacterium, Pseudomonas) had surprisingly non-existent or negative correlations with biofilm cell concentrations. In a controlled study, 15 identical shower hoses were installed for the same time period in the same country, and both stagnant and flowing water samples were collected. Ecological theory of dispersal and selection helped to explain microbiome composition and diversity of different sample types. Shower hose age was related to metal accumulation but not biofilm cell concentration, while frequency of use appeared to influence biofilm cell concentration. This study shows that shower hose biofilms are clearly a critical element of building drinking water plumbing, and a potential target for building drinking water plumbing monitoring.

Biofilms in shower hoses.

Here we used flow cytometry (FCM) and filtration paired with amplicon sequencing to determine the abundance and composition of small low nucleic acid (LNA)-content bacteria in a variety of freshwater ecosystems. We found that FCM clusters associated with LNA-content bacteria were ubiquitous across several ecosystems, varying from 50 to 90% of aquatic bacteria. Using filter-size separation, we separated small LNA-content bacteria (passing 0.4 µm filter) from large bacteria (captured on 0.4 µm filter) and characterized communities with 16S amplicon sequencing. Small and large bacteria each represented different sub-communities within the ecosystems' community. Moreover, we were able to identify individual operational taxonomical units (OTUs) that appeared exclusively with small bacteria (434 OTUs) or exclusively with large bacteria (441 OTUs). Surprisingly, these exclusive OTUs clustered at the phylum level, with many OTUs appearing exclusively with small bacteria identified as candidate phyla (i.e. lacking cultured representatives) and symbionts. We propose that LNA-content bacteria observed with FCM encompass several previously characterized categories of bacteria (ultramicrobacteria, ultra-small bacteria, candidate phyla radiation) that share many traits including small size and metabolic dependencies on other microorganisms.

Phylogenetic clustering of small low nucleic acid-content bacteria across diverse freshwater ecosystems.

Detecting disturbances in microbial communities is an important aspect of managing natural and engineered microbial communities. Here, we implemented a custom-built continuous staining device in combination with real-time flow cytometry (RT-FCM) data acquisition, which, combined with advanced FCM fingerprinting methods, presents a powerful new approach to track and quantify disturbances in aquatic microbial communities. Through this new approach we were able to resolve various natural community and single-species microbial contaminations in a flow-through drinking water reactor. Next to conventional FCM metrics, we applied metrics from a recently developed fingerprinting technique in order to gain additional insight into the microbial dynamics during these contamination events. Importantly, we found that multiple community FCM metrics based on different statistical approaches were required to fully characterize all contaminations. Furthermore we found that for accurate cell concentration measurements and accurate inference from the FCM metrics (coefficient of variation ≤ 5%), at least 1000 cells should be measured, which makes the achievable temporal resolution a function of the prevalent bacterial concentration in the system-of-interest. The integrated RT-FCM acquisition and analysis approach presented herein provides a considerable improvement in the temporal resolution by which microbial disturbances can be observed and simultaneously provides a multi-faceted toolset to characterize such disturbances.

Detection of microbial disturbances in a drinking water microbial community through continuous acquisition and advanced analysis of flow cytometry data.

Frederik Hammes

Department of Environmental Microbiology

EAWAG

Construction of a Low-cost Mobile Incubator for Field and Laboratory Use

Frederik Hammes

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Department of Environmental Microbiology

EAWAG

Construction of a Low-cost Mobile Incubator for Field and Laboratory Use

Department of Environmental Microbiology