ArticleJournal of virological methods2021
Assessing sensitivity and reproducibility of RT-ddPCR and RT-qPCR for the quantification of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater.
Article in Journal of virological methods, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 99 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Wastewater surveillance to infer COVID-19 transmission: A systematic review.The Science of the total environment · 2022Pooled it
- Critical Evaluation of Key Methods for RNA Quantification.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Targeted Wastewater Surveillance during the World Athletics Championship, Oregon, USA, 2022.Emerging infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Real-time estimation of pathogen transmission dynamics from wastewater.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Improving Inference from Reported Concentrations in Environmental Surveillance by Modeling the Statistical Features of Digital PCR.ACS ES&T water · 2026Article
- Bio-Rad and QIAGEN digital PCR platforms provide equivalent quantification for wastewater-based SARS-CoV-2 surveillance.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- SARS-CoV-2 wastewater genomic surveillance: approaches, challenges, and opportunities.Genome biology · 2026Review
- Spatially Informed Wastewater Differentiation among Locations during an Ongoing Measles Outbreak in Texas, USA.ACS environmental Au · 2025Article
- Pepper mild mottle virus as a potential indicator of occupational exposure to airborne viruses in wastewater treatment plants.Annals of work exposures and health · 2025Article
- A suite of ddPCR assays targeting microbial pathogens for improved management of shellfish aquaculture.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Investigation of a norovirus outbreak among hospital staff in Zhejiang, China: tracing the source to contaminated "red bean cake".Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Development and application of a highly sensitive quadruple droplet digital PCR method for simultaneous quantification of sulfonamide resistance genes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater by quantitative PCR and digital PCR: a case study in Shijiazhuang city, Hebei province, China.Emerging microbes & infections · 2024Article
- Article
- A Narrative Review of High Throughput Wastewater Sample Processing for Infectious Disease Surveillance: Challenges, Progress, and Future Opportunities.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Review
- Aptamer-Mediated Electrochemical Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid Protein in Saliva.Biosensors · 2024Article
- Comparison of Different Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction-Based Methods for Wastewater Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2: Exploratory Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2024Article
- A scoping review of global SARS-CoV-2 wastewater-based epidemiology in light of COVID-19 pandemic.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Wastewater-based surveillance as a tool for public health action: SARS-CoV-2 and beyond.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic there has been significant interest and investment in using Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) for surveillance of viral pathogen presence and infections at the community level. There has been a push for widescale implementation of standardized protocols to quantify viral loads in a range of wastewater systems. To address concerns regarding sensitivity, limits of quantification, and large-scale reproducibility, a comparison of two similar workflows using RT-qPCR and RT-ddPCR was conducted. Sixty raw wastewater influent samples were acquired from nine distinct wastewater treatment plants (WWTP's) served by the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD, Virginia Beach, Virginia) over a 6-month period beginning March 9th, 2020. Common reagents, controls, master mixes and nucleic acid extracts were shared between two individual processing groups based out of HRSD and the UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS, Morehead City, North Carolina). Samples were analyzed in parallel using One-Step RT-qPCR and One-Step RT-ddPCR with Nucleocapsid Protein 2 (N2) specific primers and probe. Influent SARS-CoV-2 N2 concentrations steadily increased over time spanning a range from non-detectable to 2.13E + 05 copies/L. Systematic dilution of the extracts indicated that inhibitory components in the wastewater matrices did not significantly impede the detection of a positive N2 signal for either workflow. The RT-ddPCR workflow had a greater analytical sensitivity with a lower Limit of Detection (LOD) at 0.066 copies/μl of template compared to RT-qPCR with a calculated LOD of 12.0 copies/μL of template. Interlaboratory comparisons using non-parametric correlation analysis demonstrated that there was a strong, significant, positive correlation between split extracts when employing RT-ddPCR for analysis with a ρ value of 0.86.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.