Enabling Earlier Detection of Recently Emerged SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern in Wastewater.

As clinical testing declines, wastewater monitoring can provide crucial surveillance on the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variant of concerns (VoCs) in communities. In this paper we present QuaID, a novel bioinformatics tool for VoC detection based on quasi-unique mutations. The benefits of QuaID are three-fold: (i) provides up to 3-week earlier VoC detection, (ii) more sensitive VoC detection (tolerant of >50% mutation drop-out), and (iii) leverages all mutational signatures (including insertions & deletions).