Executive summary: This detailed update from the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO) outlines major expansions in wastewater and pooled individual sequencing, air sampling analysis, and data processing capabilities, emphasizing progress toward scalable biosurveillance systems while acknowledging ongoing technical challenges and exploratory efforts.
Key points:
Wastewater sequencing has scaled significantly, with over 270 billion read pairs sequenced from thirteen sites—more than all previous years combined—thanks to collaborations with several research labs and support from contracts like ANTI-DOTE.
Pooled swab collection from individuals has expanded, with promising Q1 results leading to a decision to scale up; a public report is expected in mid Q2 detailing the findings and rationale.
Indoor air sampling work has resulted in a peer-reviewed publication, and the team is actively seeking collaborations with groups already collecting air samples, potentially offering funding for sequencing and processing.
Software development continues, with improvements to the main mgs-workflow pipeline and efforts to enhance reference-based growth detection (RBGD) by addressing issues with rare and ambiguous sequences.
Reference-free threat detection is being prototyped, including tools for identifying and assembling from short sequences with increasing abundance—efforts recently shared at a scientific conference.
Organizationally, the NAO has grown, adding two experienced staff members from Biobot Analytics and securing a $3.4M grant from Open Philanthropy to support wastewater sequencing scale-up, methodological improvements, and rapid-response readiness.
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Executive summary: This detailed update from the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO) outlines major expansions in wastewater and pooled individual sequencing, air sampling analysis, and data processing capabilities, emphasizing progress toward scalable biosurveillance systems while acknowledging ongoing technical challenges and exploratory efforts.
Key points:
Wastewater sequencing has scaled significantly, with over 270 billion read pairs sequenced from thirteen sites—more than all previous years combined—thanks to collaborations with several research labs and support from contracts like ANTI-DOTE.
Pooled swab collection from individuals has expanded, with promising Q1 results leading to a decision to scale up; a public report is expected in mid Q2 detailing the findings and rationale.
Indoor air sampling work has resulted in a peer-reviewed publication, and the team is actively seeking collaborations with groups already collecting air samples, potentially offering funding for sequencing and processing.
Software development continues, with improvements to the main mgs-workflow pipeline and efforts to enhance reference-based growth detection (RBGD) by addressing issues with rare and ambiguous sequences.
Reference-free threat detection is being prototyped, including tools for identifying and assembling from short sequences with increasing abundance—efforts recently shared at a scientific conference.
Organizationally, the NAO has grown, adding two experienced staff members from Biobot Analytics and securing a $3.4M grant from Open Philanthropy to support wastewater sequencing scale-up, methodological improvements, and rapid-response readiness.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.