Elsevier

Journal of Virological Methods

Volume 222, 15 September 2015, Pages 132-137
Journal of Virological Methods

Short communication
High performance concentration method for viruses in drinking water

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jviromet.2015.06.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Principle study of virus concentration from 98 m3 of drinking water to 1 mL.

  • New setup for ultrafiltration of volumes up to 98 m3.

  • New monolithic affinity filtration (MAF) module for large volume filtration.

  • Combination of ultrafiltration, MAF and centrifugal ultrafiltration.

Abstract

According to the risk assessment of the WHO, highly infectious pathogenic viruses like rotaviruses should not be present in large-volume drinking water samples of up to 90 m3. On the other hand, quantification methods for viruses are only operable in small volumes, and presently no concentration procedure for processing such large volumes has been reported. Therefore, the aim of this study was to demonstrate a procedure for processing viruses in-line of a drinking water pipeline by ultrafiltration (UF) and consecutive further concentration by monolithic filtration (MF) and centrifugal ultrafiltration (CeUF) of viruses to a final 1-mL sample. For testing this concept, the model virus bacteriophage MS2 was spiked continuously in UF instrumentation. Tap water was processed in volumes between 32.4 m3 (22 h) and 97.7 m3 (72 h) continuously either in dead-end (DE) or cross-flow (CF) mode. Best results were found by DE-UF over 22 h. The concentration of MS2 was increased from 4.2 × 104 GU/mL (genomic units per milliliter) to 3.2 × 1010 GU/mL and from 71 PFU/mL to 2 × 108 PFU/mL as determined by qRT-PCR and plaque assay, respectively.

Section snippets

Acknowledgement

The authors like to thank Sebastian Wiesemann and Roland Hoppe for producing the UF instrumentation, Dr. Martin Rieger for first tests, and Susanne Mahler for performing the plaque assays. We like to thank Prof. Christian Drosten from the Institute of Virology (University of Bonn) for the next generation sequencing of our tap water after applying our concentration method. The DFG (SE 1722/2-1), the Max-Buchner-Forschungsstiftung (MBFSt-2907), BMBF-FONA project EDIT (WO 033W010E) and the China

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