Author(s)

E.C. Chern & B.H. Olson

Abstract

Molecular microbial source tracking methods have been developed to identify fecal waste sources entering environmental waters. However, most, such as ribotyping and rep-PCR, rely upon library databases (Hoi et al. [1]; Sikorski et al. [2]). These methods generally are only reliable in a specific geographic region. Also, there is overlap amongst hosts, requiring manipulation of sample isolates to eliminate this segment of the population. Recently, the library independent biomarker method based on toxin genes associated with the diarrheic E. coli, has been successful in identifying human, cow or pig waste (Oshiro and Olson [3]; Khatib et al. [4], [5]). Using diarrheic E. coli as a model, the temperature-sensitive hemagglutinin, tsh, gene associated with avian pathogenic E. coli was tested as a b

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