The 2019 outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 is unprecedented with over 26 million cases of the disease associated with this novel coronavirus. Next to public monitoring and the subsequent identification and classification of SARS-CoV-2 from positive-tested samples, wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 has gained extensive public attention, complementing existing community surveillance systems.

Over the past year, methods for tracking the evolution of the virus, the origin of strains, and their transmission relative to the quantification of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA in untreated sewage have advanced. Concentrations in wastewater (or: domestic sewage) have been shown to correlate with trends in reported cases. Targeted Next-generation Sequencing (NGS) has proven to be a valuable tool for both the identification and classification of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in wastewater. In collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency EMHP  programme, NimaGen provides a specific procedure for generating sequencing libraries from SARS-CoV-2 viral nucleic acid extracts from wastewater samples, using an adaptation of the widely used NimaGen EasySeq™ SARS-CoV-2 Protocol v4.01 for WGS Library Prep by patented Reverse Complement PCR (RC-PCR). EasySeq™ is compatible with illumina^® NGS sequencing platforms.

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