Monitoring Genetic Population Biomarkers for Wastewater-Based Epidemiology

Abstract

We report a rapid "sample-to-answer" platform that can be used for the quantitative monitoring of genetic biomarkers within communities through the analysis of wastewater. The assay is based on the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) of nucleic acid biomarkers and shows for the first time the ability to rapidly quantify human-specific mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from raw untreated wastewater samples. mtDNA provides a model population biomarker associated with carcinogenesis including breast, renal and gastric cancers. To enable a sample-to-answer, field-based technology, we integrated a filter to remove solid impurities and perform DNA extraction and enrichment into a low cost lateral flow-based test. We demonstrated mtDNA detection over seven consecutive days, achieving a limit of detection of 40 copies of human genomic DNA per reaction volume. The assay can be performed at the site of sample collection, with minimal user intervention, yielding results within 45 min and providing a method to monitor public health from wastewater.

The potential of wastewater-based epidemiology as surveillance and early warning of infectious disease outbreaks

“…detected in wastewater [36]. It is believed that hoste guest information related to infectious diseases in WBE will provide valuable new insights into community public health and have important implications for potential infectious diseases.…”

Discovery of large molecules as new biomarkers in wastewater using environmental proteomics and suitable polymer probes

“…Whereas successful studies have been mostly carried out in the chemical exposure side, namely, the consumption of illegal drugs (Mastroianni et al, 2017;Thomas et al, 2012), pharmaceuticals and personal care products (Burgard et al, 2014;Gao et al, 2016), tobacco (Castiglioni et al, 2015;Ryu et al, 2016b) and alcohol use (Ryu et al, 2016a), pesticide exposure (Rousis et al, 2017), etc., and on genetic biomarkers (Ahmed et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2017), studies aimed at characterizing wastewater metabolomics and proteomics (i.e., the biological response side) are lacking. Even though several biomarkers have been proposed for that purpose, notably protein biomarkers, to the best of our knowledge, no systematic studies on wastewater proteomics have been published (Rice and Kasprzyk-Hordern, 2019).…”

Establishing early warning systems by monitoring COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) in wastewater

“…WBE ile atık sulardaki spesifik hastalık biyobelirteçlerinin seviyelerinin değerlendirilmesi, bulaşıcı ve bulaşıcı olmayan hastalıkların izlenmesi için büyük umut vaat etmektedir (19). Geçmişten günümüze yapılan çalışmalar WBE ile atık sularda HIV, tüberkloz, poliovirus, echovirus, hepatit A, rotavirus, adenovirus ve koronavirüsler gibi patojen/enfeksiyon varlığının izlendiğini göstermektedir (11,12,17,18).…”