Project: Microbial community fingerprinting to predict pathogen outgrowth in engineered aquatic systems

13/10/14 – 12/10/18

Abstract

This project will combine flow cytometry with advanced sequencing technologies to determine the governing factors of pathogen invasions in engineered aquatic systems. While flow cytometry creates specific phenotypic community fingerprints able to distinguish between different microbial communities, sequencing analysis will provide detailed insight into the composition of the microbial community. The full-scale cooling water installation, functioning on the BR2 nuclear reactor at SCK•CEN, will serve as a thoroughly controlled model system. Hypotheses extracted from this model system will be validated with lab experiments where Legionella sp. will function as model waterborne pathogen. The main hypothesis of this research is that pathogen invasions induce a community-specific response in the receiving community, which can be detected and quantified with these next-generation techniques. These community changes will then be related to the imposed fysicochemical operating parameters of the cooling water system. Besides identifying characteristic patterns, particular attention will be given towards designing biological metrics which can be applied to indicate potential pathogen invasions.