Interesting discussion about wastewater and COVID19

Interesting discussion of sewage and COVID19. Interview / discussion led by Andrew Revkin (Columbia University’s Earth Institute) and includes Rolf Halden (Arizona State University), Jeff Schlegelmilch (Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness) and Angela Rasmussen (Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health).  

#COVID19 Preprint Journal Club: “Temporal detection and phylogenetic assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in municipal wastewater”

Wastewater detection for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be a hot topic these days (full disclosure, we recently submitted a grant recently to jump on this same bandwagon).   This study “Temporal detection and phylogenetic assessment of SARS-CoV-2 in municipal wastewater” took place in Montana (USA).  This study goes a bit further than the previous one by genome …

#COVID19 Journal Club: Wastewater Surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in Australia

So this concept of doing wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 is gaining more and more traction.  We posted recently about some work from MIT showing that wastewater titers of the virus are quite a bit higher than might be expected from the clinical data we have.  I know some of the folks here at UC Davis …

#COVID19 Preprint Journal club: “Considerations for Large Building Water Quality after Extended Stagnation”

This one falls in the category of “yet another problematic thing to think about”.  In this article “Considerations for Large Building Water Quality after Extended Stagnation” the authors are not talking about COVID19 per se.  They are discussing the hazards associated with stagnant water after building remain closed for a long time because of the …

#COVID19 Preprint Journal club: “SARS-CoV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases”

Moving from hospitals into environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2, here looking at detection in wastewater.  “SARS-CoV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases“.  The title really says it all here… it’s a great demonstration of the utility of wastewater surveillance for this kind of question, although quantification is much harder than just …

Legionella sequencing in tap water and clinical isolates from Flint, MI

So this was a very interesting paper to be involved in.  On the one hand all our lab really did was to facilitate some genome sequencing and help with the assemblies, validation of those assemblies, and some genomics work.   Standard fare for the lab.  But… these were over 100 Legionella pneumophila isolates collected from either …

Water, microbes and space 

Some cool new projects funded by NASA including one on microbes in water in space being run by Jiseon Yang at ASU. NASA has awarded 15 grants for new space biology research designed to help the agency achieve its goals under the Artemis lunar exploration program. Teams of investigators will use state-of-the-art Source: NASA Artemis …

New wastewater anammox project

So our lab appears to be digging deeper and deeper into the world of wastewater treatment, especially the process of removing ammonia from wastewater in the final steps.  I’ve posted before about our sample collection from a pilot wastewater treatment facility.   We’ve been sequencing those samples like crazy… we’ve thrown Nanopore, Illumina, and PacBio data …

A different suite: distinct fungal communities in water-damaged homes

How microbial profiles differ between water-damaged and dry buildings is not well known. It’s only logical that where moisture is available indoors, microorganism will grow. Yet, measured microbial products do not show consistent differences between wet and dry homes. Because wet homes are associated with a variety of health risks, it’s important to identify the …

Journal Club: “Microwave detection and quantification of water hidden in and on building materials…”

Just a quick journal club post here, got pointed to this really interesting sounding article by David Thaler recently “Microwave detection and quantification of water hidden in and on building materials: implications for healthy buildings and microbiome studies.” As I understand the problem, it can be hard to quantify water in buildings, particularly water hidden …