Quantitative Assessment of Microbial Pathogens and Indicators of Wastewater Treatment Performance for Safe and Sustainable Water Reuse in India
Shruti Chowdhari, Shubham Rana, Samridhi Rana, Christina M. Morrison, Sarah E. Abney, Rajveer Singh, Patrick L. Gurian, Amit Kumar, Arun Kumar, Walter Q. Betancourt, Perumal Vivekanandan
Abstract
Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have rapidly increased in India during the last decade. Nonetheless, there are only a few labs in India that can perform culture-based screening for microbial quality. In the last 2 years of the pandemic, India has witnessed a sharp increase in molecular biology labs. Therefore, it is evident that culture-independent real-time PCR will be increasingly used for the assessment of microbial indicators/pathogens in wastewater, especially in resource-limited settings. There is no data available on the molecular quantitation of microbial indicators from India. There is an urgent need to understand and evaluate the performance of widely used microbial indicators via molecular quantitation in Indian WWTPs. Our findings lay the groundwork for the molecular quantitation of microbial indicators in WWTPs in India. We have screened for 12 microbial targets (indicators and human pathogens) and have identified pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) and Giardia as the best molecular microbiological indicators in Indian settings.