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Evaluation of New Components in Modified Scholten’s Medium for the Detection of Somatic Coliphages

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Abstract

Enteric bacteriophages (somatic coliphages, F-specific coliphages or both together) are now recognized as useful viral indicators in water, shellfish, and biosolids and are being progressively included in national and international sanitary regulations. Among them, somatic coliphages have an advantage in that they usually outnumber F-RNA coliphages in water environments. Their enumeration using Modified Scholten’s (MS) media, following the ISO 10705-2 standard for the growth of Escherichia coli host strain WG5, is highly efficient and a common practice worldwide. These media contain a high concentration of nutrients, which may be modified to save costs without loss of bacterial growth host efficiency. This study explored reducing the concentration of nutrients in the current formulation and/or incorporating new components to improve the host bacterial growth and/or the enumeration of somatic coliphages at an affordable analytical cost. A twofold dilution of the original MS media was found not to affect the bacterial growth rate. The addition of combinations of assayed compounds to twofold diluted MS media slightly enhanced its analytical performance without altering bacterial growth. By generating savings in both cost and time while maintaining optimal results, media dilution could be applied to design new simple applications for coliphage enumeration.

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Acknowledgements

Authors thank Prof. J. Jofre for useful comments about the manuscript. This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (AGL2016-75536) and the Aquaphage project (2016 PROD 00030, AGAUR, Catalan Government) by the Regional Development Fund (FEDER) of the European Union (FEDER 2014–2020 Operational Program).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microbiology Section, Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics, Faculty of Biology, University of Barcelona, 643 Diagonal Ave., 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    Daniel Toribio-Avedillo, Javier Méndez, Maite Muniesa & Anicet R. Blanch

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  1. Daniel Toribio-Avedillo
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  2. Javier Méndez
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  3. Maite Muniesa
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  4. Anicet R. Blanch
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. ARB, JM and DTA designed the study, DTA performed the experiments, MM and ARB supervised the work, DTA wrote the manuscript and ARB and MM revised and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Anicet R. Blanch.

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Toribio-Avedillo, D., Méndez, J., Muniesa, M. et al. Evaluation of New Components in Modified Scholten’s Medium for the Detection of Somatic Coliphages. Food Environ Virol 12, 148–157 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12560-020-09419-z

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