A portable escherichia colil detection platform for water inspection

A large proportion of the population of Thailand relies on stored rainwater or coin water dispensers show in figure 1 as their main sources of drinking and household use water. There are over 60,000 coin water dispensers as shown in figure 1 (>50,000 in Bangkok and >10,000 in other provinces) alone. Substandard in drinking water quality has long been a major issue due to no regular water testing even with regulatory mandates. Little data are available on the microbial quality of these water sources. This data gap is partly due to the high cost and technical difficulty of current water quality testing methods. There are more than 20 methods to measure and E. coli in water. The major issues with these methods are they are time consuming, labour intensive, and give retrospective information, often when it is too late to take corrective action. Most of these methods are lab-based and take at least 24 hrs to produce a result after the sample reaches the laboratory. There is an urgent need at many levels in the water supply chain to minimize contaminating E. coli. Monitoring for E. coli itself is routinely done in assessing water quality as they are a good indication on the presence of pathogens, and microbiology of, a given supply, and thus, in themselves, they are a good measure of overall water quality. In this work, our team will introduce recent developments of E. coli detection with portable systems and show our preliminary approach to develop a cost effective E. coli in water detection system with processing time less than 4 hrs based on a specific enzymatic detection (ß-D glucuronidase) which is widely used for the detection and enumeration of E. coll.