There are many ways to test municipal wastewater for signs of the virus that causes COVID-19, but scientists in Houston have determined theirs is the best yet.
A study led by environmental engineer Lauren Stadler of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering with the aid of the City of Houston Health Department and Baylor College of Medicine compared five processes used by labs around the country to concentrate samples and find the virus in wastewater from six Houston plants.
The process employed at Rice and now Baylor, called “electronegative filtration with bead beating,” proved the most sensitive to signs of the virus as well as the most cost-effective.
The study appears in the Elsevier journal Water Research.
Read more at Rice University
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