A simple system for estimating the biofilm formation potential of water: first experiments on slow-sand filtered water

A simple system for biofilm potential monitoring in drinking water

“…It might be an other hypothesis which could explain such low measured quantities of fixed biomass. Similar experiments were carried out on a slow-sand filtered water before chlorination (DELAHAYE et al 2005). In this case, considering fixed HPC-R2A, a clear increase was observed during the first three days.…”

“…Nevertheless, previous results (DELAHAYE et al 2005) proved that this method was certainly the most efficient in order to consider only the fixed biomass, without elements which could be contained in the interstitial volume of the packaging glass beads. On the other hand, this study was carried out on high chlorinated waters (Table 1) with low organic and bacterial contents.…”

“…Each flask was sonicated in a bath (70 W) during 2 minutes. This method was efficient enough to remove at least 80% of fixed biomass in terms of HPC-R2A (DELAHAYE et al 2005) without affecting cell viability (MERMILLOT-BLONDIN et al 2001). Finally, one incubator gave 120 ml of biofilm sample.…”

“…Following an optimized method (DELAHAYE et al 2005) and in order to consider only the fixed biomass, the glass beads were successively rinsed four times, each time by immersing the basket in 300 ml of sterile water during two minutes. After the rinsing step, the glass beads were dispatched in 12 glass flasks (14 g of glass beads/flask i.e.…”