A High-Throughput DNA-Sequencing Approach for Determining Sources of Fecal Bacteria in a Lake Superior Estuary

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Abstract

Current microbial source-tracking (MST) methods, employed to determine sources of fecal contamination in waterways, use molecular markers targeting host-associated bacteria in animal or human feces. However, there is a lack of knowledge about fecal microbiome composition in several animals and imperfect marker specificity and sensitivity. To overcome these issues, a community-based MST method has been developed. Here, we describe a study done in the Lake Superior–Saint Louis River estuary using SourceTracker, a program that calculates the source contribution to an environment. High-throughput DNA sequencing of microbiota from a diverse collection of fecal samples obtained from 11 types of animals (wild, agricultural, and domesticated) and treated effluent (n = 233) was used to generate a fecal library to perform community-based MST. Analysis of 319 fecal and environmental samples revealed that the community compositions in water and fecal samples were significantly different, allowing for the determinatio...
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)8263-8271
Number of pages9
JournalEnvironmental Science and Technology
Volume51
Issue number15
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 1 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Chemical Society.

Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PubMed: MeSH publication types

  • Journal Article

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