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Water Res . Characterizing influenza A virus lineages and clinically relevant mutations through high-coverage wastewater sequencing

tetano

Editor, Senior Moderator
Water Res


. 2025 Aug 21;287(Pt B):124453.
doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2025.124453. Online ahead of print. Characterizing influenza A virus lineages and clinically relevant mutations through high-coverage wastewater sequencing

Anika John[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Seju Kang[SUP] 2 [/SUP], Lara Fuhrmann[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Ivan Topolsky[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Christopher Kent[SUP] 3 [/SUP], Joshua Quick[SUP] 3 [/SUP], Tanja Stadler[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Timothy R Julian[SUP] 4 [/SUP], Niko Beerenwinkel[SUP] 5 [/SUP]



Affiliations
Abstract

Influenza A virus poses significant public health challenges, causing seasonal outbreaks and pandemics. Its rapid evolution motivates continuous monitoring of circulating influenza genomes to inform vaccine and antiviral development. Wastewater-based surveillance offers an unbiased, cost-effective approach for genomic surveillance. We developed a novel tiling amplicon primer panel that covers diversity of influenza A virus, targeting segments of the surface proteins HA, NA, and M of subtypes H1N1 and H3N2. Using this panel, we sequenced nucleic acid extracts from 59 Swiss wastewater samples collected at four locations during the 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 winter seasons. We found that wastewater-based abundance estimates of the dominant H1N1 clades correlated with clinical-based estimates in the 2023/2024 season. Furthermore, wastewater-based sequencing revealed mutations in vaccine and drug target sites, consistent with clinical data. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of wastewater-based genomic surveillance of influenza A, including lineage identification and mutation tracking to inform vaccine and antiviral strategies.

Keywords: Genomic surveillance; Influenza A; Public health; Wastewater-based epidemiology.

 
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