Abstract Description

Water quality monitoring is a process of elucidating and analyzing the biological, physical and chemical characteristics of water to ascertain its quality based on existing standard guidelines that are used for different types of water and their intended purposes. Effecting such analyses requires the use of some physical, chemical and biological indicators. For water that is related to human and animal health, microbial water quality has been used as a standard measure of the microbiological conditions of water, and indicator bacteria such as total and fecal coliforms are used to regulate microbiological water quality. These systems are culture dependent with their attendant limitations of being at best indicators of the potential presence of pathogenic organisms and far from representing the full complement of the microbial diversity of the waterbody. To overcome this challenge, the advances in environmental genomics and high-throughput sequencing technologies have shown tremendous promise as a more reliable approach in water quality monitoring and will be discussed in detail in this presentation.