Improving Wastewater Downstream Analysis with Mechanical Homogenization

Wastewater analysis has increasingly become a way to monitor infectious disease outbreaks, particularly during the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic. Wastewater testing provides public health officials insight into upcoming increases in disease burden in a community.

The problem is that multiple methodologies are used for wastewater sampling techniques. Many rely on filtration systems to capture infectious particles on electronegative membranes or tissue culture-grade nanopore filters. These methods require long processing times and ice incubations, which can burden high-throughput workflows.

The two application notes below provide evidence for why mechanical homogenization using bead-beating technology offers a better and faster way to ensure complete disruption of these filters for improved downstream molecular analysis.

Homogenization of Nanopore Membrane Filters Utilized in Wastewater Infectious Disease Surveillance

In this wastewater application note, OMNI demonstrates how bead-beating homogenization allows lab technicians to maximize the number of particles released from any filter while speeding up processing time and improving laboratory safety via infectious particle lysis. Bead-beating technology has been shown to lyse greater than 96% of infectious viral particles in a sample without disrupting downstream molecular analysis.

The OMNI Bead Ruptor Elite Bead Mill Homogenizer was shown to achieve full homogenization of a tissue culture grade electronegatively-charged membrane filter after two minutes of processing, cycling at 6 m/s for four 30-second cycles.

Detection of SARS-CoV-2 from Wastewater Samples Utilizing the Bead Ruptor Elite Bead Mill Homogenizer and Chemagic 360 Nucleic Acid Extractor

In this wastewater application note, OMNI examines a streamlined methodology for filter homogenization utilizing the OMNI Bead Ruptor Elite Bead Mill Homogenizer followed by automated RNA extraction on the Chemagic Prime instrument in preparation for RT-PCR detection of SARS-CoV-2 spiked wastewater samples. This high throughput methodology provides a robust workflow for detecting SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater samples.