Longitudinal wastewater sampling in buildings reveals temporal dynamics of metabolites

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Jun 29;16(6):e1008001. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008001. eCollection 2020 Jun.

Abstract

Direct sampling of building wastewater has the potential to enable "precision public health" observations and interventions. Temporal sampling offers additional dynamic information that can be used to increase the informational content of individual metabolic "features", but few studies have focused on high-resolution sampling. Here, we sampled three spatially close buildings, revealing individual metabolomics features, retention time (rt) and mass-to-charge ratio (mz) pairs, that often possess similar stationary statistical properties, as expected from aggregate sampling. However, the temporal profiles of features-providing orthogonal information to physicochemical properties-illustrate that many possess different feature temporal dynamics (fTDs) across buildings, with large and unpredictable single day deviations from the mean. Internal to a building, numerous and seemingly unrelated features, with mz and rt differences up to hundreds of Daltons and seconds, display highly correlated fTDs, suggesting non-obvious feature relationships. Data-driven building classification achieves high sensitivity and specificity, and extracts building-identifying features found to possess unique dynamics. Analysis of fTDs from many short-duration samples allows for tailored community monitoring with applicability in public health studies.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Construction Industry
  • Longitudinal Studies
  • Wastewater / chemistry*

Substances

  • Waste Water

Grants and funding

Funding was provided by the MIT Center for Microbiome Informatics & Therapeutics (CMIT, https://microbiome.mit.edu/), the Underworlds project funded by the Kuwait-MIT Center for Natural Resources and the Environment (https://cnre.mit.edu/) along with the MIT Senseable City Lab (http://senseable.mit.edu/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.