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Development of nucleic acid-based sensor for on-site waterborne pathogen detection
Detection methods play a significant role in monitoring water quality, surveillance, and quantitative microbial risk assessment. Proper assessment of pathogens during water quality monitoring is also critical for decision-making regarding water distribution system infrastructure and choosing the best water treatment practices to prevent waterborne disease outbreaks. Traditional cultivation-based methods are extensively used for pathogen detection in water quality monitoring, which are, however, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and often compromised by low sensitivity. Furthermore, viable but non-culturable pathogen cells may cause false negative results by cultivation-based methods.
There have been numerous advances in biomolecular methods for the detection of pathogens since PCR (polymerase chain reactions) was invented in the late 20th century. These methods provide much faster, more sensitive, and more accurate detection of pathogens than the traditional cultivation-based methods. They also present unprecedented possibilities for automatic, real-time, and in situ pathogen analysis for microbial risk assessment purposes.
To explore these possibilities, the objectives of this project are to develop biosensing techniques to solve these challenges and to adapt and integrate them into portable pathogen analysis systems that can be used under source-limited conditions.
Inactivation of pathogens in water and wastewater with photo- and electro-chemical methods
More than 2.2 million deaths and cases of severe illnesses are caused by waterborne diseases annually. Most of these deaths are children under five, approximately 4,000 every day (World Health Organization, 2015). The vast majority of these young victims died of illnesses attributable to their water source being contaminated by raw sewage. Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation, and hygiene were responsible for their deaths, which are preventable. It is estimated that 780 million people do not have access to improved water sources, and 2.5 billion people (i.e., 35% of the world’s population) lack access to improved sanitation (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). Motivated by this urgent need to provide improved water sources and sanitation for source-limited areas, the overarching goal of this project is to develop decentralized wastewater treatment technologies for pathogen removal. Targets of interest include bacteria, viruses, helminth eggs, and antibiotic resistance genes.
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