Rare viruses, vaccines, and more in over 1 trillion metagenomic reads – SecureBio
Thanks to Will Bradshaw, Kelly Chafin, Jo Faraguna, Jeff Kaufman, Ben Mueller, and Alessandro Zulli for their review on this post. As SecureBio Detection has expanded and the CASPER wastewater sequencing network has grown alongside us, we are commonly asked if we’ve ever had any interesting detections. The short answer is yes! When you sequence sewage at a clip of 80+ billion metagenomic reads a week, rare, strange, and sometimes concerning sequences are bound to turn up. While we won’t share the full details of our capabilities or everything we’ve seen, the cases below show some of what our pipelines surface in practice. Most unusual signals are not emergencies that require response, but each one demonstrates that deep sequencing can surface rare and engineered sequences, distinguish benign sources from concerning ones, and flag the cases that warrant deeper investigation. One of our major internal flagging pipelines that processes incoming sequencing data is called Chimera Detection