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Phenotypic variations of enterococci in surface waters: analysis of biochemical fingerprinting data from multi‐catchments
Author(s) -
Ahmed W.,
Katouli M.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of applied microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.889
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1365-2672
pISSN - 1364-5072
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2672.2008.03763.x
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , biology , host (biology) , drainage basin , representativeness heuristic , ecology , geography , cartography , psychology , paleontology , social psychology
Aims: The aim of this study was to identify the prevalence of environmentally adapted enterococci strains by analysing biochemical fingerprinting (BF) data of 3952 enterococci isolates collected over 5 years from the six catchments in Southeast Queensland, Australia. Methods and Results: A BF method was used to type 3952 enterococci isolates from six catchments. The environmental isolates were compared with a large existing BF library comprised of 5803 enterococci isolates from 10 host groups. Environmental isolates belonged to 801 biochemical phenotypes (BPTs), of which, an average of 29.2% was specific to each catchment. When compared with the BF library, an average of 79·5% BPTs from each catchment was identical to those in the library (i.e. host‐origin BPTs). The remaining 20·5% was regarded as non‐host origin BPTs, as they were not in the library and constituted only 5·3% of the total isolates tested for each catchment. Conclusions: Our data suggest that less than 5% of studied environmental strains was not identical to those in the library and seemed to be of environmental origin. From a microbial source tracking context, such low level of environmentally adapted strains can have a minimal impact on the performance of the library‐based methods if a large number of isolates were tested from both the host groups and environmental waters. Significance and Impact of the Study: These data shed light on the importance of the size and representativeness of library–based source‐tracking methods and their implications for the identification of faecal pollution in environmental waters.