Research Projects

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has significantly impacted public health, economies, and societies worldwide, with the emergence and spread of new variants posing challenges to control the virus. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) can be employed to identify coronavirus and its variants in circulation from sewage and domestic wastewater systems, alerting us to potential community outbreaks and identifying novel variants that pose a significant public health risk. In India, where the state of Himachal Pradesh is a hub of tourism, monitoring COVID-19 with wastewater surveillance can help study infection dynamics and manage the spread at the Clustral level. This project proposal proposes a wastewater-based monitoring approach for SARS-CoV-2 and epidemiology. Grab and composite sampling will be performed to collect waste water from five Sewage Treatment plants in Himachal Pradesh, as well as domestic wastewater and open drain systems from popular tourist locations. RNA extraction will be performed using RNA isolation kits, and RT-qPCR will be used for detection. Genome sequencing will be conducted to identify novel strains and variants. Preliminary computational models will be proposed to calculate the prevalence of infection from WBE data, allowing for a comprehensive view of infection dynamics and temporal trends across Himachal Pradesh.

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