Norwalk and other Noroviruses are being increasingly recognized as major contributors
to the disease burden caused by contaminated water supplies. Improved methods for
the detection and quantitation of these microbes in water is essential for performing
disease outbreak investigations and developing monitoring strategies for management
efforts to minimize human exposures to contaminated water. Filtration-adsorption is
commonly used to recover and concentrate these viruses from large volumes of water,
but some research suggests that commonly-used beef extract-based filter elution
solutions contain substances that inhibit reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain
reaction (RT-PCR) assays for detecting these viruses. The results of this study indicate
that a simple, well-defined eluent composed of L-lysine, and the detergent, Triton
X-100, was an effective alternative to eluents containing beef extract. No significant
differences in Norwalk Virus recovery were measured between the lysine- and beef
extract-based eluents when virus RNA was heat-released from eluent concentrates of
tap water experiments. When the filtration-elution method was applied to tap water
seeded with approximately 103 Norwalk viruses, the lysine-based eluent was found to
yield significantly greater recoveries of Norwalk viruses than 3% beef extract, 0.05M
glycine (pH 9.5). Data from filtration-elution experiments with seeded surface water
also indicated that the lysine-based eluent achieved similar or greater recoveries of
Norwalk viruses compared to the beef extract-based eluent. The results from this study
show that a high-molar lysine eluent can be an effective alternative to beef extract
eluents for detecting relatively low levels of Norwalk viruses in tap water and surface
water samples. Includes 10 references, tables, figures.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 300 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 12 |
| Published : | 11/01/2002 |
