Author Date

2022-08-05

Degree Name

Department

Biology

College

Life Sciences

Defense Date

2022-07-27

Publication Date

2022-08-05

First Faculty Advisor

Mary Davis

First Faculty Reader

Julianne Grose

Honors Coordinator

David Erickson

Keywords

COVID-19, Sequencing, Local Community, Wastewater, Timeline

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to an urgent need for scalable methods for clinical diagnostics and tracking of virus variants. In this paper, we attempted a novel method of sequencing using Large Reverse Transcriptase-based cloning (LRTC). Although our methodology ended up not working due to high amount and fast degradation of RNA, we were able to sequence multiple variants of COVID-19 Positive samples from the BYU Student Health Center and 4 sewage samples to check for variant outbreaks in corresponding times. We were able to find several corresponding variants and track the progression of mutation in our local population.