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SARS-CoV-2 Protein in Wastewater Mirrors COVID-19 Prevalence.
Preprint
in English
| medRxiv
| ID: ppmedrxiv-20185280
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to diverse approaches to track infections. The causative agent, SARS-CoV-2, is a fecally-shed RNA virus, and many groups have assayed wastewater for viral RNA fragments by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) as a proxy for COVID-19 prevalence in the community. Most groups report low levels of viral RNA that often skirt the methods theoretical limits of detection and quantitation. Here, we demonstrate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 structural proteins in wastewater using traditional immunoblotting and quantitate them from wastewater solids using an immuno-linked PCR method called Multiplex Paired-antibody Amplified Detection (MPAD). MPAD demonstrated facile detection of SARS-CoV-2 proteins compared with SARS-CoV-2 RNA via qRT-PCR in wastewater. In this longitudinal study, we corrected for stochastic variability inherent to wastewater-based epidemiology using multiple fecal content protein biomarkers. These normalized SARS-CoV-2 protein data correlated well with public health metrics. Our method of assaying SARS-CoV-2 protein from wastewater represents a promising and sensitive epidemiological tool to assess prevalence of fecally-shed pathogens in the community.
cc_by_nc
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Preprints
Database:
medRxiv
Type of study:
Cohort_studies
/
Diagnostic study
/
Experimental_studies
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Observational study
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Prognostic study
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Rct
Language:
English
Year:
2020
Document type:
Preprint