A technique that detects coronavirus strains circulating in a community could become an early-warning system
Researchers in California have flushed a wealth of data out of toilet waste. For the first time, scientists have been able to detect specific variants of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage weeks before they were showing up in testing clinics.
To overcome this, the team in California developed a method that uses nanobeads to increase the amount of viral RNA that can be sequenced from a wastewater sample. Previous techniques allowed scientists to sequence no more than 40% of the viral RNA in a sample, whereas the nanobead method enabled the researchers to sequence nearly 95%. The California team also developed a tool, called Freyja, to identify the variants present in each sample, and their relative abundance.
On the UCSD campus, the researchers consistently detected Alpha, Delta and a less well-known variant, Epsilon, which was found mostly in the United States. This was surprising because there were weeks during which those variants had nearly disappeared from clinical surveillance, says co-author Joshua Levy, an applied mathematician at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.BA.4 and BA.
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