Biography

Dr. Janet Mans obtained her BSc, BSc (Hons), and MSc degrees in Biochemistry (University of Pretoria, South Africa). From 1999 she worked on fowl pox-based Newcastle disease virus vaccines at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute (South Africa). In 2004 she joined the Laboratory of Immunology (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, USA) as a predoctoral fellow in the Molecular Biology Section under the supervision of Dr. David Margulies. She obtained her Ph.D., on the structure and function of mouse cytomegalovirus MHC-I homologs, in 2008 (Wits University, South Africa). Since 2008 she worked on noroviruses, first as a postdoctoral fellow in the Enteric Virus and Environmental Virology Group at the Department of Medical Virology, University of Pretoria, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2014. Her research combines norovirus surveillance in the clinical setting and the environment to understand the molecular epidemiology and diversity in South Africa.

Discipline

Enteric viruses, norovirus, environmental virology

Research description

Wastewater-based epidemiology is a valuable tool to monitor the presence and diversity of environmentally stable viruses in the community. South Africa (SA) has just experienced its first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel beta coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. On 4 October 2020,  >679000 cases and >16900 deaths have been reported in SA. Approximately 1000-2000 new cases are still diagnosed daily, a sharp decline from the ~13000 cases a day detected at the pandemic's peak in July 2020. This project aims to assess whether SARS-CoV-2 can be detected consistently over time in river water to monitor the presence and concentration trends of the virus and to characterize the spike protein in selected samples to assess strain diversity. River water will be collected from three rivers in Gauteng weekly for a period of ~3 months, and SARS-CoV-2 will be recovered from water samples using skimmed milk flocculation. Real-time molecular assays will be utilized to detect the virus, and the partial spike protein gene will be characterized in high titre samples. Monitoring river water could provide early warning of a rise in communities that lack formal sewage systems where runoff contaminates rivers.

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