Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID GA_2024_Graham

Identifying and apportioning sources of fecal pollution to surface waters using shotgun metagenomics and bioinformatics

Institute: Georgia
Year Established: 2024 Start Date: 2024-09-01 End Date: 2025-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $21,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $21,000

Principal Investigators: Katherine Graham

Project Summary: Fecal contamination in the water environment results in millions of illnesses per year through recreational activities. Fecal contamination is typically assessed in surface waters through the culture of fecal indicator bacteria (FIB), which are bacteria that have a relationship with gastrointestinal health risks at sewage-impacted beaches. However, FIB are not source-specific, meaning they can be from sewage, animal feces, or naturalized populations in the environment. As such, the field of fecal source tracking (FST) seeks to discern the sources of feces in surface waters to inform remediation, although current methods for FST are low throughput. To this end, we have developed a novel bioinformatic pipeline (“SourceApp”) that produces estimates on the contributions of different fecal sources to a water sample metagenome. This project aims to implement SourceApp at the field scale at several impaired water sites to evaluate the tool’s performance in real-world situations and guide future remediation efforts.