Wastewater epidemiology is a method used to study the diseases affecting a population. Conventional methods of wastewater collection for composite samples have involved the usage of autosamplers that require installation in sewers with appropriate expertise and certification. Tampon-based wastewater sampling is a cost-effective and simple way to collect wastewater to study microbial pathogens. It is also a safer alternative as tampons can be deployed and retrieved without opening manhole covers. In this protocol we detail a wastewater sampling strategy using tampons to obtain composite samples.
Next, wastewater-based epidemiology has predominantly been targeted, where scientists have looked for specific pathogens and use biomarkers for the same. Notably, traditional wastewater filtration methods (i.e. skim milk filtrations and membrane filtration) require large sample sizes with varying nucleic acid yields (Ahmed 2022). Recently, Nanotrap‱ technology has been shown to have a higher nucleic acid yield using a smaller sample size when compared to traditional membrane filtration techniques, making it a better tool for scientists to concentrate microbial nucleic acids in wastewater for wastewater epidemiology. Specifically, the Ceres Nanotrap‱ technology was developed to trace severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) in public wastewater and Nanotrap‱ particles have been used specifically to track viral pathogenic shedding in wastewater of: Endogenous pepper mottle virus (PMMoV), Influenza A, CrAssphage, and monkey pox. However, there is little known about the success rates of different downstream analysis techniques to concentrate microbes in wastewater in an untargeted fashion. Therefore, it remains unclear whether one method will work better than the other if one were to be interested in characterizing the microbial community composition and abundance in a wastewater sample. To this end, in this protocol we detail a wastewater processing method involving Ceres Nanotrap‱ technology and NucleoMag‱ RNA Water.