With the rapid growth of global population, there is an increasing demand for clean water for food crop production. Surface waters that are currently the most commonly used for irrigation of food crops will soon not be sufficient to meet this demand. Hence, there is a growing need to evaluate water recycling solutions for energy efficiency and microbiological safety. Currently established methods for microbiological safety testing of water rely on microbial indicators that too often fail to indicate the presence of foodborne pathogens. This can result in large and deadly foodborne outbreaks like those that occurred this year due to lettuce contaminated with pathogenic E. coli.
We therefore propose to: (i) take an innovative approach to the detection of microbiological water safety hazards based on changes in the microbial ecology of surface and recycled water; and (ii) assess the safety and energy efficiency of an ecological wastewater treatment system (the Penn State Eco-MachineTM) to advance the knowledge in the field and produce tangible applied outputs that will benefit the University, US agriculture, and global sustainability.
Resulting Publications
Roman B, Brennan RA. Coupling ecological wastewater treatment with the production of livestock feed and irrigation water provides net benefits to human health and the environment: A life cycle assessment. J Environ Manage. 2022, 288:112361. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112361. Epub 2021 Mar 21. PMID: 33756385.
Chung T, Yan R, Weller D, Kovac J. Conditional forest models built using metagenomic data could accurately predict Salmonella contamination in Northeastern streams. 2022, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.11.499664v1
Resulting Presentations
Chung T, Yan R, Weller D, Kovac J. Prediction of Salmonella contamination in surface water samples using microbiome data analyzed with machine learning classifiers. International Association of Food Protection. 2022. Poster presentation.
Bajracharya G, Yan R, Roman B, LaBorde L, Brennan R, Kovac J. Microbiological quality of Penn State wastewater before and after recycling through the EcoMachine. Allegany Branch of the American Society for Microbiology, 2019. Poster presentation.
Researchers
Jasna Kovac
