— Kendra Maas<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\u201cWithin the Storrs campus wastewater system, we are able to actually, manually sample from a specific area,\u201d Maas says. \u201cThe wastewater treatment plant already collects inlet samples every day, and we can pretty easily put sampling pumps out on the lift stations and collect them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stanley Nolan, UConn\u2019s Director of Utility Operations and Energy Management, says that while they are still evaluating all of the potential access points where sampling pumps could be installed, Facilities Operations sees great value in the wastewater testing protocol.<\/p>\n
\u201cDr. Maas came forward with the potential for testing shortly into the COVID pandemic,\u201d he says, \u201cand being essential employees, and knowing the criticality of this, partnering with student health services and research to do whatever\u2019s necessary to find a solution to this pandemic crisis is an important thing to do. Areas where we have easy access will obviously be tested first. Anything that\u2019s more difficult may require an additional install, and the funding and cost sourcing for that has been provided while the specific locations are still being decided.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maas says her ultimate goal is to be able to process these wastewater samples \u2013 which must be 24-hour composite samples in order to provide meaningful snapshots of any detectable COVID-19 genetic abundance \u2013 and to report back their results within one day.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an ambitious plan for her small lab, which she says will also be assisting Student Health and Wellness with ongoing surveillance testing of students for COVID-19 by providing in-house processing of pooled test samples from student groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudent Health and Wellness is going to be monitoring 5 to 10 percent of the student body, just on a random rolling basis, and MARS will be part of the in-house collaboration of people who are testing pools of samples, likely saliva, for COVID,\u201d she says. \u201cIn the meantime, I\u2019ll be testing the wastewater, and if I see a spike in the North Dorms, as an example, then Student Health and Wellness can take their next few days\u2019 worth of random tests and focus them on the North Dorms to try to isolate the individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maas and the MARS lab will not know who the individuals who contribute to pooled samples are, she said, but if they detect COVID-19 in those pools, Student Health and Wellness will then be able to contact those individuals for further testing and evaluation by medical professionals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pools will allow us to test a lot more people,\u201d says Maas, and the wastewater can help guide where that pooled testing will be most effectively deployed.<\/p>\n
In order to test the wastewater for COVID, though, she first has to concentrate it, which is accomplished by filtering the sample, after which she extracts all of the RNA \u2013 COVID-19 and otherwise \u2013 that she finds in the filter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI expected wastewater to be very gross,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you get a half liter of it, it actually isn\u2019t that gross. Especially at UConn in the summer. There aren\u2019t that many people around, so it just looks like kind of cloudy water.\u201d<\/p>\n
To see if any of the RNA belongs to the coronavirus, she\u2019s working with two different detection methods \u2013 Quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction, or QRT-PCR, the same assay currently used in a vast majority of FDA-approved clinical COVID-19 tests; and Droplet Digital Polymerase Chain Reaction, or DD-PCR, a more sensitive but more time-consuming detection method.<\/p>\n
Using these methods, Maas has already found COVID in UConn\u2019s wastewater, even with reduced density as classes went online and large numbers of faculty and staff began telecommuting.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile I was expecting COVID levels on campus to be very low, I always expected them to be positive,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I got the first set of samples in late June, I expected to be able to detect COVID given how high the infection rate was in Connecticut in April and May. I think it\u2019s at pretty low concentrations, and the COVID we\u2019re detecting on campus could be from someone who\u2019s recovered. Or it could also be from someone who\u2019s asymptomatic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because it\u2019s theorized that younger people are more likely to have COVID-19 and remain asymptomatic \u2013 yet still able to transmit the virus to others \u2013 Maas says wastewater testing could have a significant impact on controlling coronavirus outbreaks on college campuses.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless you\u2019re doing completely random testing and you get lucky, you just won\u2019t find that asymptomatic person,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd this is a way to catch that \u2013 it won\u2019t catch the individual person, but it at least tells us that there are asymptomatic people.\u201d<\/p>\n
More broadly, Maas hopes she will be able to continually refine her wastewater COVID-19 detection technique \u2013 making it more efficient and cost effective \u2013 so that the wastewater surveillance developed at UConn might also be applied to other wastewater systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one of the duties of UConn being the land grant institution for the state is that we need to be helping the state figure out how to track infection,\u201d she says, \u201cso that\u2019s my other reason for really wanting to figure out how to do testing as quickly and cheaply as possible in the lab, to be able to open this up to municipalities, or to school districts.\u201d<\/p>\n
She continued, \u201cNobody wants the state of Connecticut to do another blanket shutdown, and this is a way that UConn can help the state potentially avoid another blanket shutdown and instead do targeted shutdowns in select towns or cities throughout the state. If a state shutdown is targeted, maybe we can afford to better support the people in Connecticut who are being directly affected by the shutdown.\u201d<\/p>\n
For information about health, safety, and coronavirus testing at UConn in the fall semester, visit reopen.uconn.edu<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UConn scientist Kendra Maas is watching wastewater from the campus for early signs of COVID-19 infection. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":163510,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2213,2231,2076,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2168],"class_list":["post-163345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coronavirus","category-health-well-being","category-research","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 01:55:21","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163345"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163610,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163345\/revisions\/163610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/163510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163345"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=163345"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=163345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}