Global urban virome

Urban sewage water surveillance can be used to monitor virus spread and diversity. A key challenge is to perform sewage surveillance for a broad range of known and unknown viruses, as this requires sensitive next-generation sequencing workflows and complex bioinformatic analysis. By applying non-capture and capture-based Illumina sequencing to longitudinally collected urban sewage samples from 63 major cities across the world, we showed that a plethora of viruses can be found.