RAPID: Determine Community Disease Burden of COVID-19 by Probing Wastewater Microbiome

全球新冠肺炎大流行是一场紧迫的全球卫生和经济危机。感染暴发季节性重现的可能性加剧了当前疫情的影响。这种潜在的季节性循环对目前以临床为基础的疾病监测方法提出了巨大的挑战，这种方法不能充分测试无症状和轻微症状的患者。由于未诊断的感染正在推动新冠肺炎大流行中的疾病传播，因此迫切需要替代方法来评估传播情况。为了直接满足这一需求，该项目将发展通过分析废水微生物群来评估社区感染流行率的科学，有望为微生物疾病监测提供一种快速、灵敏和全面的方法。成功的开发将使人们能够评估污水处理厂服务的人群的感染率，包括那些症状轻微或没有症状的人。这种能力将通过实时指示疾病在新的热点地区出现的位置，极大地改善对大流行的监测。这些信息将为控制当前新冠肺炎大流行的干预战略提供依据，并帮助国家更有效地管理未来的疫情。这个快速项目在应对新冠肺炎大流行方面有两个具体的研究目标。第一个目标是开发和优化废水基质中包膜病毒(如冠状病毒)的高效浓缩和检测方法。鉴于水样中最常用的病毒浓缩方法是针对无包膜病毒开发的，因此迫切需要这方面的知识。因此，这一阶段研究的成功完成将填补一个重大的技术空白，并大大提高检测和监测水和废水中的SARS-CoV2的能力。第二个目标是从受疾病影响的社区收集时间敏感的废水样本。废水将被用来确定废水中SARS-CoV2和其他包膜病毒的丰度、多样性和时间动态。这些数据将被分析，以重建新冠肺炎的社区传播程度。这项研究将产生关于新冠肺炎社区传播的急需信息，并有助于验证基于废水的监测方法。如果成功，这项研究将提供一种新的途径，通过废水监测来保护国家的公共健康。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The global COVID-19 pandemic is an urgent global health and economic crisis. The impacts of the current outbreak are exacerbated by the potential for infection outbreaks to seasonally reoccur. This potential seasonal cycling presents a great challenge to the current clinic-based disease surveillance approach which does not adequately test asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients. There is a critical need for alternative methods to assess spread, as undiagnosed infections are driving disease transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. To directly address this need, this project will develop the science to assess community infection prevalence by analyzing the wastewater microbiome, promising a rapid, sensitive, and comprehensive approach for microbial disease surveillance. Successful development will allow assessment of infection rates in the population served by the wastewater treatment plant, including those with mild or no symptoms. Such capabilities would dramatically improve surveillance of pandemics by indicating in real time where the disease is emerging in new hotspots. Such information would inform intervention strategies for controlling the current COVID-19 pandemic, and help the Nation manage future outbreaks more effectively. This RAPID project has two specific research objectives in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first objective is to develop and optimize a highly efficient concentration and detection method for enveloped viruses (like coronavirus) in the wastewater matrix. There is urgent need for this knowledge given that the most commonly used concentration methods for viruses in water samples were developed for the non-enveloped viruses. Successful completion of this phase of the research will thus fill a major technological gap and significantly advance the capability to detect and monitor the SARS-CoV2 in water and wastewater. The second objective is to collect time-sensitive wastewater samples from communities impacted by the disease. The wastewater will be used to determine the abundance, diversity, and temporal dynamics of SARS-CoV2 and other enveloped viruses in the wastewater. These data will be analyzed to reconstruct the extent of COVID-19 community transmission. The research will generate much-needed information on community transmission of COVID-19, as well as serve to validate the wastewater-based surveillance approach. If successful, this research will provide a new avenue to protect the public health of the Nation through wastewater surveillance.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.