Tyler Radniecki, CBEE
Born at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, OSU’s wastewater surveillance efforts, led by Drs. Christine Kelly and Tyler Radniecki (both professors in the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering), are still going strong. On-going collaborative efforts include researching how wastewater surveillance can contribute to pandemic resilient cities (National Science Foundation), creating a national wastewater surveillance network for tracking antibiotic resistance genes, bacteria and pharmaceuticals (US Environmental Protection Agency), as well as monitoring state-wide community disease dynamics for SARS-CoV-2, influenza and RSV (Oregon Health Authority). Additional current pilot-scale wastewater surveillance projects include monitoring for Candida auris and antibiotic resistance genes at health care facilities and identifying the presence of the markers for H5N1 influenza strain in Oregon communities.
Throughout it all, Oregon State University’s Center of Quantitative Life Sciences (CQLS) has been a critical partner in these efforts. CQLS wet lab staff assist with nucleic acid extractions from wastewater, library preparation and sequencing of wastewater samples. Additionally, CQLS bioinformatics staff have helped develop and implement bioinformatic pipelines to identify wastewater surveillance targets and report relevant results to OHA and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. I can honestly say that every member of the CQLS staff has played a hand in our wastewater surveillance efforts.
It is due to our collaborative efforts with CQLS that a lot of exciting advancements in wastewater surveillance have been made. For instance, in collaboration with the OSU TRACE team, we demonstrated that wastewater surveillance is less biased than clinical surveillance at estimating COVID-19 prevalence in a community and that wastewater surveillance can identify COVID-19 hotspots and variant compositions of a community. We have used wastewater sequence surveillance to identify COVID-19 variants in a community before they were identified in clinical samples. Additionally, we demonstrated that wastewater sequence surveillance could accurately identify the COVID-19 variant relative abundances in the state, a critical finding as clinical COVID-19 sequencing has declined substantially from its peak. Finally, we have used wastewater surveillance data to help evaluate the effectiveness of COVID-19 policies implemented by Oregon State University during the first two years for the pandemic.
As we continue to move forward with our wastewater surveillance work, the CQLS will remain a critical collaboration. Together we are developing novel bioinformatic tools and pipelines to identify strains of RSV, norovirus and influenza. Additionally, we are moving forward with new wastewater surveillance projects that will explore links between the environment and human pathogens as well as use our national wastewater surveillance network to monitor the spread climate sensitive diseases in the US. While these endeavors remain challenging, I am grateful to have access to the CQLS to advance our goals.
