Research Progress on Detection of Infectious Enteric Viruses in Environmental Water

Enteric viruses are one of the leading causes of waterborne disease worldwide. It is urgent to develop rapid and sensitive methods to detect infectious viruses in water environment. Despite being a gold standard for virus infectivity detection, cell culture infectivity assays are laborious, time consuming, and costly, and some viruses such as human noroviruses have not been able to be cultured in vitro. Common molecular biological methods show high sensitivity and specificity in viruses detection in water; however, the lack of correlation between detected viral gene copy number and viral infectivity is a main limitation. This review presented a summary and critical evaluation of different approaches proposed to overcome limitations of the traditional cell culture assay and polymerase chain reaction assay.