24-hour multi-omics analysis of residential sewage reflects human activity and informs public health

High-throughput molecular analysis of sewage is a promising tool for precision public health. Here, we combine sewer network and demographic data to identify a residential catchment for sampling, and explore the potential of applying untargeted genomics and metabolomics to sewage to collect actionable public health data. We find that wastewater sampled upstream in a residential catchment is representative of the human microbiome and metabolome, and we are able to identify glucuronidated compounds indicative of direct human excretion, which are typically degraded too quickly to be detected at treatment plants. We show that diurnal variations during 24-hour sampling can be leveraged to discriminate between biomarkers in sewage that are associated with human activity from those related to the environmental background. Finally, we putatively annotate a suite of human-associated metabolites, including pharmaceuticals, food metabolites, and biomarkers of human health and activity, suggesting that mining untargeted data derived from residential sewage can expand currently-used biomarkers with direct public health or policy relevance.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2019-08-07

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/728022
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Municipal Wastewater as a Microbial Surveillance Platform for Enteric Diseases: A Case Study for Salmonella and Salmonellosis.

  2018cited by this paper
• Initiatives for Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance in the Environment: Current Situation and Challenges

  2018cited by this paper
• Multi-year inter-laboratory exercises for the analysis of illicit drugs and metabolites in wastewater: Development of a quality control system

  2018cited by this paper
• Multi-year interlaboratory exercises for the analysis of illicit drugs and metabolites in wastewater: development of a quality control system

  2018cited by this paper
• The Potential of Wastewater Testing for Public Health and Safety August 2017

  2017cited by this paper
• From dispensed to disposed: evaluating the effectiveness of disposal programs through a comparison with prescription drug monitoring program data

  2017cited by this paper
• Monitoring wastewater for assessing community health: Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (SCIM)

  2017influential reference
• Estimation of polio infection prevalence from environmental surveillance data

  2017cited by this paper
• An Atlas of β-Glucuronidases in the Human Intestinal Microbiome.

  2017cited by this paper
• Quantitative analysis of opioids and cannabinoids in wastewater samples

  2017cited by this paper
• Elevated Blood Lead Levels in Children Associated With the Flint Drinking Water Crisis: A Spatial Analysis of Risk and Public Health Response.

  2016cited by this paper
• The Potential of Wastewater Testing for Rapid Assessment of Opioid Abuse (Research Brief)

  2016cited by this paper
• Comparison of pharmaceutical, illicit drug, alcohol, nicotine and caffeine levels in wastewater with sale, seizure and consumption data for 8 European cities

  2016cited by this paper
• Emerging investigators series: sewer surveillance for monitoring antibiotic use and prevalence of antibiotic resistance: urban sewer epidemiology

  2016cited by this paper
• Impact of the Berkeley Excise Tax on Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption.

  2016cited by this paper
• Sewage Reflects the Microbiomes of Human Populations

  2015influential reference
• The Israeli public health response to wild poliovirus importation.

  2015cited by this paper
• Identifying personal microbiomes using metagenomic codes

  2015cited by this paper
• Tailoring Community-Based Wellness Initiatives With Latent Class Analysis — Massachusetts Community Transformation Grant Projects

  2014cited by this paper
• Working upstream: how far can you go with sewage-based drug epidemiology?

  2014cited by this paper
• Sewage epidemiology and illicit drug research: the development of ethical research guidelines.

  2014cited by this paper
• A model to estimate the population contributing to the wastewater using samples collected on census day.

  2014cited by this paper
• Detection of Pathogenic Viruses in Sewage Provided Early Warnings of Hepatitis A Virus and Norovirus Outbreaks

  2014cited by this paper
• Effects of sewer conditions on the degradation of selected illicit drug residues in wastewater.

  2014cited by this paper
• Intensified environmental surveillance supporting the response to wild poliovirus type 1 silent circulation in Israel, 2013.

  2014cited by this paper
• Evidence that a tax on sugar sweetened beverages reduces the obesity rate: a meta-analysis

  2013cited by this paper
• Opioid overdose rates and implementation of overdose education and nasal naloxone distribution in Massachusetts: interrupted time series analysis

  2013cited by this paper
• Optical analogues of the Newton–Schrödinger equation and boson star evolution

  2013cited by this paper
• Distribution-Based Clustering: Using Ecology To Refine the Operational Taxonomic Unit

  2013cited by this paper
• An analysis of ethical issues in using wastewater analysis to monitor illicit drug use.

  2012cited by this paper
• Antioxidant activity of phenolic acids and their metabolites: synthesis and antioxidant properties of the sulfate derivatives of ferulic and caffeic acids and of the acyl glucuronide of ferulic acid.

  2012cited by this paper
• Real-time estimation of small-area populations with human biomarkers in sewage.

  2012cited by this paper
• Comparing illicit drug use in 19 European cities through sewage analysis.

  2012cited by this paper
• Structure, Function and Diversity of the Healthy Human Microbiome

  2012cited by this paper
• pymzML - Python module for high-throughput bioinformatics on mass spectrometry data

  2012cited by this paper
• A Cross-platform Toolkit for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics

  2012cited by this paper
• HMDB 3.0—The Human Metabolome Database in 2013

  2012cited by this paper
• Bio::Homology::InterologWalk - A Perl module to build putative protein-protein interaction networks through interolog mapping

  2011cited by this paper
• Procedures for large-scale metabolic profiling of serum and plasma using gas chromatography and liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry

  2011cited by this paper
• Illicit drug consumption estimations derived from wastewater analysis: a critical review.

  2011cited by this paper
• Refining the estimation of illicit drug consumptions from wastewater analysis: co-analysis of prescription pharmaceuticals and uncertainty assessment.

  2011cited by this paper
• Sampling for pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and illicit drugs in wastewater systems: are your conclusions valid? A critical review.

  2010cited by this paper
• In silico fragmentation for computer assisted identification of metabolite mass spectra

  2010cited by this paper
• Community Health Status Indicators Project: The Development of a National Approach to Community Health

  2008cited by this paper
• Estimating Community Drug Abuse by Wastewater Analysis

  2008cited by this paper
• Naïve Bayesian Classifier for Rapid Assignment of rRNA Sequences into the New Bacterial Taxonomy

  2007cited by this paper
• Proposed minimum reporting standards for chemical analysis

  2007cited by this paper
• Identifiability in Genomic Research

  2007cited by this paper
• Identification and measurement of illicit drugs and their metabolites in urban wastewater by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry.

  2006cited by this paper
• XCMS: processing mass spectrometry data for metabolite profiling using nonlinear peak alignment, matching, and identification.

  2006cited by this paper
• METLIN: A Metabolite Mass Spectral Database

  2005cited by this paper
• ACETIC ACID IN LIVER AND KIDNEY REACTIONS OF CARBOXYL-LABELED FATTY ACID METABOLISM: III.

  2003cited by this paper
• Glucuronidation in Humans

  1999cited by this paper
• Identification of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and their metabolites in solid phase extracts of human urine using capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry

  1995cited by this paper
• Defecation frequency and timing, and stool form in the general population: a prospective study.

  1992cited by this paper
• Enterohepatic Circulation of Bile Acids

  1989cited by this paper
• [Enterohepatic circulation of bile acids].

  1984cited by this paper
• The determination of urinary phenylacetylglutamine as phenylacetic acid. Studies on its origin in normal subjects and children with cystic fibrosis.

  1971cited by this paper
• Urobilinogen excretion in normal adults; results of assays with notes on methodology.

  1957cited by this paper
• PHENYLACETYLGLUTAMINE AS A CONSTITUENT OF NORMAL HUMAN URINE

  1954cited by this paper

• Investigating illicit drug hotspots and daily variations using sewer-network wastewater analysis.

  2024cites this paper
• Investigating Sewer Parameters Leading to Manhole Corrosion: A Case Study from the City of Arlington, Texas

  2024cites this paper
• Socioeconomic drivers of the human microbiome footprint in global sewage

  2024cites this paper
• An innovative approach for predicting pandemic hotspots in complex wastewater networks using graph theory coupled with fuzzy logic

  2023cites this paper
• Targeted metagenomic sequencing for detection of vertebrate viruses in wastewater for public health surveillance

  2023cites this paper
• MicrobiomeCensus estimates human population sizes from wastewater samples based on inter-individual variability in gut microbiomes

  2022cites this paper
• A Metagenomic Investigation of Spatial and Temporal Changes in Sewage Microbiomes across a University Campus

  2022cites this paper
• Lead time of early warning by wastewater surveillance for COVID-19: Geographical variations and impacting factors

  2022cites this paper
• Modeling SARS-CoV-2 RNA Degradation in Small and Large Sewersheds

  2021cites this paper
• Data, Analytics and Interoperability Between Systems (IoT) is Incongruous with the Economics of Technology

  2021cites this paper
• Analysis of 39 drugs and metabolites, including 8 glucuronide conjugates, in an upstream wastewater network via HPLC-MS/MS.

  2021cites this paper
• Optimal selection of monitoring sites in cities for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance in sewage networks

  2021cites this paper
• Rapid Assessment of Opioid Exposure and Treatment in Cities Through Robotic Collection and Chemical Analysis of Wastewater

  2020cites this paper
• Microbial Species Abundance Distributions Guide 1 Human Population Size Estimation from Sewage 2 Metagenomes 3

  2020influential citation
• Microbial Species Abundance Distributions Guide Human Population Size Estimation from Sewage Microbiomes

  2020influential citation
• Making waves: Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 for population-based health management

  2020cites this paper
• Longitudinal wastewater sampling in buildings reveals temporal dynamics of metabolites

  2019cites this paper