Wastewater Surveillance Laboratory
Northern Illinois University
About Us
Wastewater surveillance testing for SARS-CoV-2 is useful for unbiased assessment of ambient pathogen prevalence in the community. Measurements show predictive value for emerging COVID-19 cases in the community. The lab has expanded to routinely test for RSV and Influenza A, with a constantly growing list of pathogens that may be a threat to public health. WBE supplanted individual testing, and is broadly adaptable to other public health challenges, now and in the future
Automated Workflow
Automation allows for significantly more sample sites to be processed in a single day with less hands-on time. To learn more, click here
Wastewater Collection
24 hour composite samples are collected from outside every dorm 3 day a week and brought back to the lab for processing.
Automated Concentration and Isolation
Using robotics units and magnetic bead based concentration and isolation methods, we are able to reliably get RNA from wastewater within 4 hours of receiving the samples.
Amplification and Detection
The isolated RNA is amplified and measured via RT-qPCR for the concentration of our various pathogen targets The results are normalized and uploaded to our public dashboard
Retired Method
While very thorough and reliable, the manual extraction method was not scalable and very labor intensive. For this reason the lab shifted to automation with the increase in sample sites.
Manual Concentration
Each sample was put through a vacuum filtration setup where the biomatrix was concentrated onto a piece of filter paper that we could then further process.
Phenol Chloroform Extraction
The material was resuspended from the filter paper and taken through an extensive series of organic solvent treatments that resulted in consistently pure and robust RNA.
Amplification and Detection
The RNA was amplified using RT-qPCR and normalized to the RNA yield from the previous steps before being reported onto the public dashboard.
