Microbial source tracking in a rural watershed dominated by cattle

Microbial Source Tracking in a Watershed Dominated by Swine

“…Furthermore, the cross validation testing indicated the library was representative with a 9% or less difference in the ARCC of the validation analysis and the CC rates of the individual sources in the library. Graves et al [21] reported a known source library ARCC of 95.4%, Hagedorn et al [25] achieved an ARCC of 87%, and Wiggins et al [45] reported a known source library ARCC 74%. The ARCC obtained in our study was similar to that found by Graves et al [21].…”

“…Graves et al [21] reported a known source library ARCC of 95.4%, Hagedorn et al [25] achieved an ARCC of 87%, and Wiggins et al [45] reported a known source library ARCC 74%. The ARCC obtained in our study was similar to that found by Graves et al [21]. However, one must note that nearly all of the earlier studies didn"t employ stringent measures for library representative testing.…”

“…Genotypic approaches that have been investigated include repetitive element based polymerase chain reaction (rep-PCR) fingerprinting [9][10][11][12], ribotyping [13] amplified fragment length polymorphism [14], pulse field gel electrophoresis [15], denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis [16], detection of source specific marker genes [17,18]. Phenotypic investigations have included carbon source utilization profiles (CUP) [19], biochemical fingerprinting [20], and antibiotic resistance profiles [21][22][23].…”

“…Antibiotic resistance analysis (ARA), one of the earliest MST methods developed, has been tested in a variety of different watershed environments [22][23][24][25] and is still used in fecal source tracking studies [21,[26][27][28][29]. The ARA approach is based on the premise that fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) from hosts exposed to antibiotics will develop resistance to those antibiotics, and on the hypothesis that this selective pressure would be a mechanism for discriminating among fecal indicator bacteria from a variety of hosts [30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

“…Performance success [21,28,37] coupled with cost effectiveness [38] made ARA a good choice for determining the sources of fecal pollution in a small watershed with few major contributors of fecal pollution. This paper describes the use of ARA to determine sources of E. coli in a segment of Six Runs Creek, located in a small Sampson County, North Carolina, watershed with a high concentration of swine production.…”