BactoTRANS

Water contaminated with human and animal enteric pathogens puts public health at serious risk. All countries and regions of the world require highly robust and effective water management and treatment systems to guarantee water quality and protect public health. The project aims to develop new bacterial overland transport models that will enable reliable predictions of where bacterial pathogens come from, how they move through the environment, and where they go. This project will take a holistic approach by combining microbiological, and molecular methods and parameters for analyzing bacterial overland transport. Small-scale precipitation experiments are conducted in the laboratory and larger-scale experiments will be conducted using a unique precipitation simulator under real environmental conditions. To study the bacterial overland transport during laboratory and field experiments, we will analyze fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) by culture-based and qPCR-based methods which is a genetic analysis method used e.g. also for Covid-19 testing. FIB are indicators for fecal pollution but do not provide information about the fecal source. We will therefore also analyze genetic fecal markers, so-called microbial source tracking (MST) markers which are associated to specific hosts (e.g. humans, ruminants). To test if FIB and MST markers are suitable for indicating bacterial pathogens that are relevant for human health, we will also analyze several bacterial reference pathogens by qPCR. FIB, MST markers and bacterial pathogens will be analyzed for the first time in parallel during bacterial overland transport. The measured data will flow into the development of models and eventually lead to more reliable predictions. Moreover, we will investigate the influence of physical-chemical properties and weathering of animal feces and the effect of changing environmental conditions on bacterial overland transport. We will compare our experiments using different livestock and wildlife animal feces with a high impact on human health. From the relationship between the experimental analyses at small and larger scale we will derive upscaling rules for our models. Our approach will provide the scientific basis for accurate predictions of bacterial overland transport, which may be extended to viruses and protozoa in the future. This project thus has great potential to revolutionize this field of research.