Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 mutational profiles at a university and its surrounding community reveals a 20G outbreak on campus

Wastewater surveillance of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been leveraged during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as a public health tool at the community and building level. In this study, we compare the sequence diversity of SARS-CoV-2 amplified...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-04, Vol.17 (4), p.e0266407
Main Authors: Swift, Candice L, Isanovic, Mirza, Correa Velez, Karlen E, Sellers, Sarah C, Norman, R Sean
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic libraries
Amplification
Bar codes
Biology and life sciences
College campuses
Colleges & universities
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
COVID-19 diagnostic tests
Data processing
Disease transmission
Environmental health
Genotypes
Health sciences
Health surveillance
Humans
Infections
Management
Medicine and health sciences
Metropolitan areas
Mutation
Outbreaks
Pandemics
People and places
Physical Sciences
Population
Public health
Purification
Quarantine
Research and Analysis Methods
SARS-CoV-2 - genetics
School buildings
Severe acute respiratory syndrome
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Sewage
Students
Surveillance
Trends
Universities
Viral diseases
Waste Water
Wastewater facilities
Wastewater treatment
Wastewater treatment plants
Wastewater-Based Epidemiological Monitoring
Water treatment
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Summary:Wastewater surveillance of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been leveraged during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as a public health tool at the community and building level. In this study, we compare the sequence diversity of SARS-CoV-2 amplified from wastewater influent to the Columbia, South Carolina, metropolitan wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and the University of South Carolina campus during September 2020, which represents the peak of COVID-19 cases at the university during 2020. A total of 92 unique mutations were detected across all WWTP influent and campus samples, with the highest frequency mutations corresponding to the SARS-CoV-2 20C and 20G clades. Signature mutations for the 20G clade dominated SARS-CoV-2 sequences amplified from localized wastewater samples collected at the University of South Carolina, suggesting that the peak in COVID-19 cases during early September 2020 was caused by an outbreak of the 20G lineage. Thirteen mutations were shared between the university building-level wastewater samples and the WWTP influent collected in September 2020, 62% of which were nonsynonymous substitutions. Co-occurrence of mutations was used as a similarity metric to compare wastewater samples. Three pairs of mutations co-occurred in university wastewater and WWTP influent during September 2020. Thirty percent of the detected mutations, including 12 pairs of concurrent mutations, were only detected in university samples. This report affirms the close relationship between the prevalent SARS-CoV-2 genotypes of the student population at a university campus and those of the surrounding community. However, this study also suggests that wastewater surveillance at the building-level at a university offers important insight by capturing sequence diversity that was not apparent in the WWTP influent, thus offering a balance between the community-level wastewater and clinical sequencing.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0266407