Temporal Detection and Phylogenetic Assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in Municipal Wastewater

By A. Nemudryi, A. Nemudraia, T. Wiegand, Kevin Surya, M. Buyukyoruk, Calvin Cicha, Karl K. Vanderwood, R. Wilkinson, B. Wiedenheft. Cell Reports Medicine, 2020

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Summary SARS-CoV-2 has recently been detected in feces, which indicates that wastewater may be used to monitor viral prevalence in the community. Here, we use RT-qPCR to monitor wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 RNA over a 74-day time course. We show that changes in SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations follow symptom onset gathered by retrospective interview of patients but precedes clinical test results. In addition, we determine a nearly complete (98.5%) SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence from wastewater and use phylogenetic analysis to infer viral ancestry. Collectively, this work demonstrates how wastewater can be used as a proxy to monitor viral prevalence in the community and how genome sequencing can be used for genotyping viral strains circulating in a community.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a547ec4d1e569046fbc12255d10c7180dea42ed