The microbiological dimension of water quality is one of the most important quality parameters of water and is still mainly determined using manual cultivation-based methods. In this presentation, a measuring device will be presented that is able to measure the bacterial contamination or microbiological water quality fully automatically within 15 minutes. The measuring principle of the ColiMinder is based on the direct measurement of the metabolic turnover of the living target organisms. The enzymatic measuring approach used in the ColiMinder is the only rapid measuring method capable of specifically measuring the most important indicator organisms (E. coli, enterococci, total bacterial count) and thus also continues the important concept of indicator organisms in the area of "near real-time methods".
The technology presented has been on the market since 2016 and is already used worldwide in applications ranging from highly purified water, the pharmaceutical industry, food and beverage industry, drinking water production but also surface water bathing water various process water especially the monitoring of the integrity of membranes to wastewater and wastewater treatment. The presentation will give a brief introduction to how the measurement technology works and then show how the technology can be used and what advantages, possibilities and new insights its use enables in practice using a number of practical examples.
Various scientific contributions used the ColiMinder and evalutated the correlation between enzymatic measurement results of ß-glucuronidase activity, E. coli [CFU] and waterborne pathogens as well as microbiological source tracking markers. Other papers compare different measurement approaches and methods for rapid and fully automated measurement of microbial water quality. Only three studies are listed here as examples.
Literature:
[1] Favere, J., Waegenaar, F., Boon, N., & De Gusseme, B. (2021). Online microbial monitoring of drinking water: How do different techniques respond to contaminations in practice? Water Research, 117387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2021.117387.
[2] Burnet, J.-B.; Habash, M.; Hachad, M.; Khanafer, Z.; Prévost, M.; Servais, P.; Sylvestre, E.; Dorner, S. (2021). Automated Targeted Sampling of Waterborne Pathogens and Microbial Source Tracking Markers Using Near-Real Time Monitoring of Microbiological Water Quality. Water, 13, 2069. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/w13152069
[3] Cazals, M., Stott, R., Fleury, C., Proulx, F., Prévost, M., Servais, P., Dorner, S., & Burnet, J.-B. (2020). Near real-time notification of water quality impairments in recreational freshwaters using rapid online detection of β-D-glucuronidase activity as a surrogate for Escherichia coli monitoring. Science of The Total Environment, 720, 137303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.137303