Recovery of solid-associated virus: evaluation of different procedures

Three different extraction-concentration methods for virological analysis of sludge, marine and river sediments are studied. Enterovirus present in the concentrates were enumerated using the plaque technique with BGM cells. The results show that the indirect extraction technique isolated virus from the largest number of marine sediment samples. The direct extraction method is the best to recover virus from river sediments. Among the sludge samples, the number of positive samples did not vary much with the different techniques. It appears that there is no one universal method for virus concentration applicable to all categories of sediments and sludge.