Verification of Bacteroidales 16S rRNA markers as a complementary tool for detecting swine fecal pollution in the Yangtze Delta

Abstract To correctly assess and properly manage the public health risks associated with exposure to contaminated water, it is necessary to identify the source of fecal pollution in a watershed. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of our two previously developed real time-quantitative PCR (qPCR) assays for the detection of swine-associated Bacteroidales genetic markers (gene 1–38, gene 3–53) in the Yangtze Delta watershed of southeastern China. The results indicated that the gene 1–38 and 3-53 markers exhibited high accuracy (92.5%, 91.7% conditional probability, respectively) in detecting Bacteroidales spp. in water samples. According to binary logistic regression (BLR), these two swine-associated markers were well correlated (P