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Norwalk and other Noroviruses are being increasingly recognized as major contributorsto the disease burden caused by contaminated water supplies. Improved methods forthe detection and quantitation of these microbes in water is essential for performingdisease outbreak investigations and developing monitoring strategies for managementefforts to minimize human exposures to contaminated water. Filtration-adsorption iscommonly used to recover and concentrate these viruses from large volumes of water,but some research suggests that commonly-used beef extract-based filter elutionsolutions contain substances that inhibit reverse transcriptase-polymerase chainreaction (RT-PCR) assays for detecting these viruses. The results of this study indicatethat a simple, well-defined eluent composed of L-lysine, and the detergent, TritonX-100, was an effective alternative to eluents containing beef extract. No significantdifferences in Norwalk Virus recovery were measured between the lysine- and beefextract-based eluents when virus RNA was heat-released from eluent concentrates oftap water experiments. When the filtration-elution method was applied to tap waterseeded with approximately 103 Norwalk viruses, the lysine-based eluent was found toyield significantly greater recoveries of Norwalk viruses than 3% beef extract, 0.05Mglycine (pH 9.5). Data from filtration-elution experiments with seeded surface wateralso indicated that the lysine-based eluent achieved similar or greater recoveries ofNorwalk viruses compared to the beef extract-based eluent. The results from this studyshow that a high-molar lysine eluent can be an effective alternative to beef extracteluents for detecting relatively low levels of Norwalk viruses in tap water and surfacewater samples. Includes 10 references, tables, figures.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 11/01/2002 Number of Pages: 12 File Size: 1 file , 300 KB