H2O Member | Tue Aug 18, 2020 | 12:37 AM | Likes: 1 

What Can I Do on COVID-19?

Categories: Tech, Education | Pubby Cash Received:  0 |

I have participated in two meetings on soliciting COVID-19 research ideas hosted by the IUP research institute and the Indiana Borough. There appears to be a national campaign on exploring wastewater epidemiology - quantification of COVID-19 viruses (i.e. SARS-COV-2 virus) in wastewater and projection of infected people in a community. And the meetings are all about it. I highly doubt this is feasible: (1) There are concentration problems when wastewater samples are processed for viruses (Calgua et al. 2020). This is not like laboratory reagent water isolation. The environmental applications, especially in wastewater matrix, are quite complicated; (2) Even if some viruses are successfully discovered from a wastewater sample, the results from the current real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) technology give RNA copies with a sensitivity as low as 5 RNA copies per reaction. It is not the count of infectious live viruses, but the non-infectious dead viruses. Such data will lead to over-estimation of the infected people if improperly interpreted; (3) Scientists have reported PCR inhibition problems during detection of the SARS-COV-2 virus (Kitajima et al. 2020). All of these above-mentioned problems will make the sensitivity and reliability of SARS-COV-2 quantification an issue. For a reliable control, another virus that is expected not present in the wastewater could be spiked into the sample, and go through the same concentration, isolation, and PCR processes as the target SARS-COV-2 virus. Enteric viruses such as murine norovirus and mengovirus, which are both single-stranded RNA viruses like the SARS-COV-2, could serve as the spike virus, but none of studies has investigated this so far. As far as what I could contribute to this kind of pandemic-related research problems with my expertise, I mentioned in the meetings a possible approach of exploring presence/absence test kits for wastewater SARS-COV-2 quick testing, expand the testing capability at different campus buildings and different time periods, and utilizing such data to obtain useful information. However, as I have been doing further research on such preliminary idea, it does not seem possible at current stage, as there is no established protocols on such test for SARS-COV-2, even for the viral surrogates. The training and protection of student workers for sampling wastewater are also an issue during the pandemic. Thus, I've decided to move on towards other plans. As my literature research goes on deeper and deeper, I've found tons of published papers on COVID-19 in the environmental field coming out just in the past 4-5 months and it is very important I don't miss such a opportunity of filling these huge and numerous research gaps at current stage. Combining with my expertise, I'm thinking of (1) figuring out the unit water or wastewater treatment processes for additional log reduction of viruses. This would be a literature study based on the published data on viral inactivation kinetics during different types of experimental conditions; and (2) conducting a computational analysis based on the global, national, and regional data. The machine learning techniques can be used in this case for projection and interpretation of results. A pre-proposal will be written seeking for potential funding. Students in my courses in Fall will be directed to go ahead with such researches to collect data, analyze data, and submit the results to journal publications if possible.