24-hour multi-omics analysis of residential sewage reflects human activity and informs public health

Wastewater-based epidemiology is a promising tool for public health. However, technical challenges remain to be solved before its full potential can be realized. Here, we explore whether upstream residential sewage surveillance using untargeted genomics and metabolomics is a viable strategy for public health applications. We find that wastewater sampled upstream in a residential catchment contains more human-derived bacteria and metabolites than at downstream wastewater treatment plants, and are able to identify glucuronidated compounds indicative of direct human excretion, which are typically degraded too quickly to be detected at treatment plants. We show that diurnal variations during 24-hour sampling can be leveraged to identify human-associated components of the sewage metabolome and microbiome. Daily dynamics of analytically-confirmed urinary and fecal metabolites reflect human behavior but differ from each other. Finally, we putatively annotate a suite of human-associated metabolites, suggesting that mining untargeted data derived from residential sewage can expand currently-used biomarkers with direct public health or policy relevance. Together, these results suggest that implementing wastewater epidemiology in urban settings could provide a new source of community-level health data with direct impact on public health practice.