Level of spiked virus necessary to correctly assess enteric virus recovery in water matrices.

Level of spiked virus necessary to correctly assess enteric virus recovery in water matrices. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2019 Apr 12;: Authors: Li Q, Qiu Y, Pang XL, Ashbolt NJ Abstract Quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) identifies human enteric viruses in municipal wastewaters as the pathogen group requiring highest log-reductions for various reuse applications. When estimating virus concentration, however, method performance is not well understood, which without inclusion actual risks are likely severely underestimated. To evaluate recovery efficiency for viruses in water, 'known' amounts of virus are often spiked into a water sample and then recovered after a series of analytical procedures. Yet for water matrices such as wastewaters, due to the unknown background concentrations of targeted viruses in the matrix and the variable recovery efficiency between individual processes, only an approximation of the recovery efficiency may be obtained from such spike-and-recovery experiments. Here, we theoretically demonstrated that for two widely-used approximations, the error in estimating virus recovery should be less than the ratio of the amount of target virus in the background sample to that in the spike. Furthermore, we developed an applicable method, based on this new understanding, to decide on the amount of virus for spiking before conducting a spike-and-recovery experiment, so that the approximation error is restricted to...
Source: Applied and Environmental Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Authors: Tags: Appl Environ Microbiol Source Type: research