Sital Uprety, Pei-Ying Hong, Nora Sadik, Bipin Dangol, Rameswor Adhikari, Antarpreet Jutla, Joanna L. Shisler, Patrick Degnan, Thanh H. Nguyen
Abstract
We conducted a study to examine the effect of seasonal variations and the disruptive effects of the 2015 Nepal earthquake on microbial communities associated with drinking water sources. We first characterized the microbial communities of water samples in two Nepali regions (Kathmandu and Jhapa) to understand the stability of microbial communities in water samples collected in 2014. We analyzed additional water samples from the same sources collected from May to August 2015, allowing the comparison of samples from dry-to-dry season and from dry-to-monsoon seasons. Emphasis was placed on microbes responsible for maintaining the geobiochemical characteristics of water (e.g., ammonia-oxidizing and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria and archaea and sulfate-reducing bacteria) and opportunistic pathogens often found in water (Acinetobacter). When examining samples from Jhapa, we identified that most geobiochemical microbe populations remained similar. When examining samples from Kathmandu, the abundance of microbial genera responsible for maintaining the geobiochemical characteristics of water increased immediately after the earthquake and decreased 8 months later (December 2015). In addition, microbial source tracking was used to monitor human fecal contamination and revealed deteriorated water quality in some specific sampling sites in Kathmandu post-earthquake. This study highlights a disruption of the environmental microbiome after an earthquake and the restoration of these microbial communities as a function of time and sanitation practices.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 9. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 December 2017.
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#3,856,213
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Outputs from Frontiers in Microbiology
#3,676
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#81,697
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Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Microbiology
#117
of 523 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,498,099 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 83rd percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 25,938 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 6.3. This one has done well, scoring higher than 85% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 523 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 77% of its contemporaries.
