Our work on detecting cryptic SARS-CoV-2 variants in NYC wastewater has been published in Nature Communciations. Emily Anthes of the NY Times wrote a great article abou the work.

Last January, a team of researchers searching for the coronavirus in New York City’s wastewater spotted something strange in their samples. The viral fragments they found had a unique constellation of mutations that had never been reported before in human patients — a potential sign of a new, previously undetected variant.

For the past year, these oddball sequences, or what the scientists call “cryptic lineages,” have continued to pop up in the city’s wastewater.