Establishment of quantitative and recovery method for detection of dengue virus in wastewater with noncognate spike control.

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) represents an efficient approach for public pathogen surveillance as it provides early warning of disease outbreaks; however, it has not yet been applied to dengue virus (DENV), which might cause endemics via mosquito spread. In this study, a working platform was established to provide direct virus recovery and qPCR quantification from wastewater samples that were artificially loaded with target DENV serotypes I to IV and noncognate spike control viral particles. The results showed qPCR efficiencies of 91.2 %, 94.8 %, 92.6 % and 88.7 % for DENV I, II, III, and IV, respectively, and a broad working range over 6 orders of magnitude using the preferred primer sets. Next, the results revealed that the ultrafiltration method was superior to the skimmed milk flocculation method for recovering either DENV or control viral particles from wastewater. Finally, DENV-2 was loaded simultaneously with the noncognate spike control and could be recovered at comparable levels either in PBS or in wastewater, indicating the applicability of noncognate spike control particles to reflect the efficiency of experimental steps. In conclusion, our data suggest that DENV particles in wastewater could be recovered and quantitatively detected in absolute amounts, indicating the feasibility of DENV surveillance using the WBE approach.

Storm pulse responses of fluvial organic carbon to seasonal source supply and transport controls in a midwestern agricultural watershed.

Storm events are the primary mechanisms of delivering fluvial organic carbon (OC) in both dissolved (DOC) and particulate (POC) forms but their sources and flow pathways can vary with seasonal land use and weather. Within the low relief and poorly drained landscapes of a predominantly agricultural watershed in Eastern Iowa, six storm events were monitored for DOC and POC concentrations over a two hydrological year period in order to investigate the export mechanisms, landscape connectivity, and hydro-climatological controls of fluvial OC under representative events and associated management practices. Event-driven dynamics favored POC over DOC, where POC accounted for 54-94 % of total OC export during events, highlighting a sampling-driven bias against POC in the absence of event monitoring. The disparity between POC and DOC export exhibited a seasonal effect, where the POC:DOC export ratio was low (1.3-1.7) for October events while June/July events yielded a much higher value (up to a value of 14.7). The relationships between event DOC and POC export, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index of landscapes, and antecedent wetness conditions suggest a strong interaction or competing influences between vegetation coverage and runoff-generation threshold. While we recognize the low statistical power of the limited data set (n = 6), the storm events could be binned into two clusters: a "bare soil" period and a crop "rapid growth" period. Specifically, intra-storm variations in OC concentration and concentration-discharge (C-Q) hysteresis patterns demonstrated a seasonally-dependent access to contributing OC sources, which can be viewed as the rapid liberation of DOC during the "bare soil" period, and a progressive leaching of terrestrial DOC during the "rapid growth" period. Although high resolution event monitoring of fluvial carbon is rare this work highlights the importance of such efforts to predict C sourcing and transformation in inland water systems under variable land use and across seasons.

[Current status of nitrogen and phosphorus losses and related factors in Chinese paddy fields: A review]. / æˆ‘å›½ç¨»ç”°æ°®ç£·æµå¤±çŽ°çŠ¶åŠå½±å“å› ç´ ç ”ç©¶è¿›å±•.

Rice is one of the main crops in China. Therefore, it is important to understand the current status and influencing factors of nitrogen and phosphorus losses from paddy fields in China, which would facilitate assessing the potential of chemical fertilizer reduction in different rice cultivating regions. We summarized the current knowledge on nitrogen and phosphorus losses from surface runoff in major rice cultivating areas in China, as well as their influencing factors, such as rainfall, planting pattern, cultivation techniques, fertilization management, water management strategies, etc. The total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) losses from runoff in six major rice cropping areas ranged from 5.09 to 21.32 and 0.70 to 3.22 kg·hm-2, respectively. The highest losses of TN and TP were the South China double rice cropping area. The TN runoff losses were the lowest in the North China single rice cropping area, while the lowest TP runoff losses occurred in plateau single and double rice cropping area of the Southwest China. The peaks of TN and TP in surface water of paddy fields were generally higher than those of the runoff water based on farmers' conventional fertilization in different rice cropping areas. The peak period of nitrogen and phosphorus losses was in a week after rice fertilization. There could be a potential of 20% reduction of nitrogen and phospho-rus for farmers' conventional fertilization compared with the optimized fertilization. Among all the factors, rainfall and fertilization management were the main ones affecting the runoff losses of nitrogen and phosphorus in paddy fields. Fertilization management and water management strategies were the mostly controllable, including reduction of fertilizers, application of new fertilizers, replacement of chemical fertilizers by organic fertilizers, water-saving irrigation, etc. Overall, the risk of nitrogen and phosphorus losses in paddy fields was more prominent in the Southern China than in any other areas of China. Rice cultivation should be carried out in a more resource-efficient way to reduce nutrient loss. Future research should focus on non-point source pollution monitoring of paddy fields, nitrogen and phosphorus losses risk assessment, nitrogen and phosphorus losses characteristics and mechanisms, and new technologies for reducing chemical fertilization inputs and environmental risks.