Monitoring the treatment reliability of an advanced water treatment system for water repurification using indigenous coliphage

A breakthrough procedure to monitor the overall treatment reliability of an advanced water treatment (AWT) system for water repurification was developed. The procedure is based on enumerating indigenous coliphages native to the wastewater throughout the AWT system. Two different methods were evaluated for enumerating the indigenous coliphage, which are: the Membrane Filtration Method (MFM) and the Double Agar Layer (DAL) method. For the DAL method, C3000 host organism was only used while for the MFM, tests were done using either C3000 or Famp host organisms. Significant amount of natural coliphage was observed in the secondary effluent which allowed monitoring an overall AWT removal in the range of 4 - 6 logs. The MFM was shown to be a viable and sensitive enumerating method to monitor the treatment reliability of the AWT system. In addition, the MFM was shown to be an effective presence/absence test for viruses in the AWT effluent, with incubation time as low as 8 hours.