PONE-D-22-31923Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 genomic populations on a country-wide scale through targeted sequencingPLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE

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Funding was provided by the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement to DSS and MT to support wastewater research in the global south. The grant supported the costs associated with the RNA extraction and sequencing. 

  

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I suggest authors to go through the comments from the reviewers and resubmit the revised version of the manuscript.

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: N/A

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: The country-wide SARS-CoV-2 surveillance of viral populations from wastewater samples is overall a promising and interesting study. The authors performed sampling and extraction and quantification of SARS-CoV-2 from different sampling sites across Uruguay at different time points. The manuscript is well-written and presented with appropriate figures and tables. However, there are some concerns which need to be addressed.

Major comment:

Wastewater surveillance was found to be a powerful and complementary approach to clinical testing in monitoring the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Authors report surveillance of variants of concern (VOCs) or No-VOCs agrees with clinical testing. It would be interesting to correlate these temporal changes with clinical data or the confirmed cases with statistical comparisons.

Figure 2 amino acids and their frequencies are shown in circular graphs for each location. Is this a Pie chart? Presented in the form of a Pie should sum to 100%.

Minor comment:

The scale on the Y-axis for Figure 1C is not completely visible.

Reviewer #2: The manuscripts presents useful results detailing wastewater surveillance (WWS) conducted using targeted amplification. It is well written.

It is somewhat surprising to see OK091006 used as a reference. While OK091006 indeed represents an example of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 it is a Genbank record without extensive information on its provenance and quality control. The authors do not explain why this was chosen in addition to the more conventional Wuhan Hu-1 reference (which has been the subject of several revisions and has been deposited in NCBI's RefSeq coollection of curated sequences)

Finally the authors claim that data is available in NCBI SRA but I could not find it using the accession numbers provided. If the data is embargoed pending publication the authors should state that.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 genomic populations on a country-wide scale through targeted sequencing

PONE-D-22-31923R1

Dear Dr. Trujillo,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Nagarajan Raju

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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