Nucleic Acid Observatory

Throughout the pandemic, governments utilized wastewater monitoring to detect and quantify emerging infectious disease outbreaks. They employed qPCR to track the spread of COVID-19, and amplicon sequencing to identify and trace SARS-CoV-2 variants. Building on this track record, the NAO team is exploring broader detection methods, such as metagenomic sequencing, to identify, flag, and investigate newly emerging and unknown pathogens. As an emerging technology, however, metagenomic sequencing of wastewater requires comprehensive evaluation, prompting the NAO to develop both computational and wet-lab benchmarking tools.

To assess and improve the performance of wastewater monitoring against a known ground truth, the NAO has developed a unique library of DNA-based, non-toxic, and environmentally benign tracers for deposition into wastewater systems. The synthetic genomes encapsulated in these tracers encode regions designed for detection and quantitation through qPCR, amplicon sequencing, and metagenomics, allowing the amount of tracer released at a given location to be quantitatively linked to the amount present in a downstream sample. Large-scale experiments with these tracers could help build a comprehensive understanding of the performance of wastewater disease monitoring under different conditions, bringing us closer to the goal of robust & reliable pathogen detection.