Wastewater-based disease monitoring. Wastewater contains biomarkers, such as genes and proteins, that indicate health status in a community. The concentrations of the biomarkers in wastewater can be used as early warning signals of disease outbreaks and/or evidence for decision-making in response to public health threats. We are particularly interested in recovering and quantifying the biomarkers from complex wastewater matrices, predicting their stability in the sewer systems, and understanding the correlation of wastewater data with the public health indicators. Our on-going effort is to optimize methods to recover viral particles from wastewater for various downstream analyses, including culture-based assays, biomolecular methods, genomic sequencing, and proteomic analysis. We collaborate closely with the government, academic institutions, and industry to make our impacts.
The work is sponsored by:
-
Erie County Department of Health, award # 91287
-
Department of Health and Human Services, award # 5NU50CK000516-04-00
-
National Science Foundation, Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Phase I, award # CCF 2200173
