Assessment of the influence of intrinsic environmental and geographical factors on the bacterial ecology of pit latrines

Belen Torondel, Jeroen H. J. Ensink, Ozan Gundogdu, Umer Zeeshan Ijaz, Julian Parkhill, Faraji Abdelahi, Viet-Anh Nguyen, Steven Sudgen, Walter Gibson, Alan W. Walker, Christopher Quince

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56 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

Improving the rate and extent of faecal decomposition in basic forms of sanitation such as pit latrines would benefit around 1.7 billion users worldwide, but to do so requires a major advance in our understanding of the biology of these systems. As a critical first step, bacterial diversity and composition was studied in 30 latrines in Tanzania and Vietnam using pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes, and correlated with a number of intrinsic environmental factors such as pH, temperature, organic matter content/composition and geographical factors. Clear differences were observed at the operational taxonomic unit, family and phylum level in terms of richness and community composition between latrines in Tanzania and Vietnam. The results also clearly show that environmental variables, particularly substrate type and availability, can exert a strong structuring influence on bacterial communities in latrines from both countries. The origins and significance of these environmental differences are discussed. This work describes the bacterial ecology of pit latrines in combination with inherent latrine characteristics at an unprecedented level of detail. As such, it provides useful baseline information for future studies that aim to understand the factors that affect decomposition rates in pit latrines.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)209-223
Number of pages15
JournalMicrobial Biotechnology
Volume9
Issue number2
Early online date15 Feb 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2016

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research received financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (grant number OPP52641). AWW and JP were supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant number 098051]. AWW and the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen, receive core funding support from the Scottish Government Rural and Environmental Science and Analysis Service (RESAS). UZ is funded by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Independent Research Fellowship (NE/L011956/1). CQ is funded through an Medical Research Council fellowship (MR/M50161X/1) as part of the MRC Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics consortium (MR/L015080/1).

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