Rose Kantor ’10, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California – Berkeley, delivered a biology seminar talk on Oct. 8, 2018. Her topic was “The microbial world within water reuse.”
Ever been curious about what’s in your tap water besides water? Drinking water microbiology is at the intersection of biology and engineering, where high-throughput DNA sequencing can inform design decisions for engineered processes affecting millions of consumers. One important process, advanced purification of wastewater to drinking water, is about to be implemented in several cities across the western US.
In this talk, Rose Kantor ’10 discusses her experience using molecular tools to observe microbial communities inside advanced water purification facilities and in model distribution systems. Very few bacteria pass through advanced water purification, and the types of bacteria that grow afterward are usually different than those found before purification.
Analyses suggest that processes after advanced purification have a strong influence on the microbial communities present in the final drinking water, so these processes should be carefully designed. The data also provide a cautionary tale for microbiome studies regarding contamination and the use of controls.