Wastewater sequencing reveals early cryptic SARS-CoV-2 variant transmission.

ABSTRACT: As SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread and evolve, detecting emerging variants early is critical for public health interventions. Inferring lineage prevalence by clinical testing is infeasible at scale, especially in areas with limited resources, participation, or testing and/or sequencing capacity, which can also introduce biases^1-3. SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration in wastewater successfully tracks regional infection dynamics and provides less biased abundance estimates than clinical testing^4,5. Tracking virus genomic sequences in wastewater would improve community prevalence estimates and detect emerging variants. However, two factors limit wastewater-based genomic surveillance: low-quality sequence data and inability to estimate relative lineage abundance in mixed samples.

SUBMITTER: Karthikeyan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9433318 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature