Next steps in wastewater surveillance: defining the wastewater RNA virome

You’ve heard of sewage as an environmental health problem, but have you ever thought of it as a health solution? This seminar will explore the world of wastewater-based surveillance and how we can harness it for public health. I will start by describing work performed at UC Berkeley during the COVID19 pandemic and beyond, and then describe the most recent advances in this area. Working with collaborators at U Missouri, UW Madison, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, we performed metagenomic analysis of 321 wastewater samples collected from 11 sites between 2023-2025. Samples were sequenced to an unprecedented depth of 1 billion reads each, metagenomes were assembled, and viral genomes were compiled into a non-redundant database. We are now leveraging this database to understand the typical wastewater virome. Some questions I’ll answer in this talk include: What kinds of viruses are in wastewater and how novel are these viruses? Do any viral abundances follow temporal trends? How close are we to collecting genomes for all viruses and what are we missing? You’ll never think of sewage the same way again!

Speaker: Rose Kantor, Lawrence Livermoe National Laboratory