Optimization and evaluation of a method to detect adenoviruses in river water

Adenoviruses are often implicated in recreational water disease outbreaks but existing methods for their detection perform poorly within these matrices. In this study, small volume (100 mL) concentration was used to identify processes that promoted recovery of adenovirus from river water. Several alternative secondary concentration techniques were investigated and compared to the baseline method consisting of primary concentration via filtration, followed by celite mediated secondary concentration. The alternative secondary concentrations included multiple filter elutions, soaking the filter for 15 min prior to elution and concentration using pre-treated celite (river water, 1.5% and 3% milk) instead of a filter. Modifications of the viral nucleic acid extraction technique were also evaluated. Concentration using pre-treated celite and a modified extraction technique (10 min boil and a 1 h ProK incubation at 37 °C) recovered significantly higher levels of adenovirus (P = 0.001) than other methods tested. This optimized method increased recovery of spiked adenovirus (57 ± 27%) compared to baseline method performance (4 ± 3%) indicating that use of pre-treated celite as opposed to filtration significantly improves recovery. Application of the optimized concentration method to larger volume (1 L) of river water resulted in similar recoveries (42 ± 19%) underlying the utility of this method to detect adenovirus from environmental samples.