理工学英語セミナー：Access human community microbiota through wastewater: potentials and challenges

Associate Professor Tao Yan, Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI

Associate Professor Tao Yan（University of Hawaii, Honolulu）が来日される機会に、ご講演をお願いいたしました。ぜひご参集ください。

講義の概要は以下の通りです。

Municipal wastewater systems (MWSs), including the collection and treatment systems, provide unique access to the collective microbiomes of human communities. This brings unparalleled capabilities in understanding and studying community health. This talk will present results from two case studies illustrating both the potentials and challenges of using MWSs to access human community microbiome for public health surveillance. The first study investigated the abundance and diversity of pathogenic E. coli genes, including stx1, stx2 and eaeA, in municipal wastewater. The relative abundance of eaeA gene versus the general E. coli marker gene uidA gene was determined by qPCR to estimate the proportion of EPEC in municipal wastewater, which indicates the prevalence of EPEC in the community to be around 1.0%. The diversity of E. coli eaeA gene was determined by clone library construction followed by sequencing, which identified several major eaeA subtypes that are not commonly observed in health clinics. The second study obtained Salmonella isolates from weekly wastewater composite samples. The wastewater Salmonella isolates were typed using PFGE, and then compared with Salmonella isolates collected during the same time period from health clinics. The concurrent detection of numerous Salmonella serotypes in both health clinics and sewage samples strongly support the feasibility of using sewage for real-time disease outbreak surveillance.