Public Health seminar series—Genetic Diversity and Evolutionary Convergence of Cryptic SARS-Cov-2 Lineages Detected Via Wastewater Sequencing

Wastewater surveillance offers an unbiased, cost-effective method to track community viral loads and monitor emerging variants, circumventing the inherent biases and limitations of clinical testing. Wastewater surveillance during the early stages of the pandemic revealed highly mutated "cryptic lineages" across United States sewersheds that were entirely absent from clinical patient samples. Although we initially investigated animal reservoirs, this hypothesis was eventually ruled out. Instead, the evidence suggests that these cryptic lineages likely arose during prolonged, localized gut infections in immunocompromised individuals. Ultimately, our findings establish that persistently infected immunocompromised patients are the likely source of novel, highly divergent viral variants. 

Featuring:
John J. Dennehy, PhD
Professor of biology
Director of the Ira Spar Biosciences Laboratory 
Queens College and The Graduate Center 
of The City University of New York

Cost: Free

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