Role of pepper mild mottle virus as a tracking tool for fecal pollution in aquatic environments

Abstract

The plant pathogen pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) has recently been proposed as a water quality indicator, it is a RNA virus belonging to the genus Tobamovirus in the family Virgoviridae that causes harm to the pepper crops. After consuming processed food products containing infected peppers, such as hot sauces, PMMoV is excreted in high concentrations in feces; therefore, this is the most common RNA virus, constantly found in the feces of humans. The fecal–oral pathway is emerging as an environmental problem. The presence of high concentrations of pathogens associated with human excreta in environmental waters or water reuse supplies poses a threat to public health. Due to the difficulty in determining the presence of pathogens effectively in water, attempts to monitor microbial water quality often use surrogates or indicator organisms that can be easily detected; therefore, PMMoV is used as a viral surrogate in aquatic environment. This paper describes the incidence and persistence of PMMoV in aquatic environments and in waste treatment plants and its usefulness for quantifying virus reductions by advanced water treatment technologies. In recent research, SARS-CoV-2 was reported to be found in wastewater and utilized for the purpose of monitoring coronavirus illness outbreaks. Since PMMoV is readily identified in the human feces and can also serve as an indicator of human waste, the determined PMMoV concentrations may be utilized to give the normalized report of the SARS-CoV-2 concentration, so that, the amount of human waste found in the wastewater can be taken into consideration.