Genomic Surveillance for SARS-COV2 in India: Indian SARS-COV2 Genomics consortium (INSACOG)-shotgun

Antimicrobial resistance is a global and challenging issue and it needs to be tackled in thecontext of environmental and clinical settings to reduce its spread and minimize thetherapeutic failure. Considering this, studying sewage water is a good proxy to understandthe resistant and emerging bacterial communities that are risking the healthcare system andhuman health. The current surveillance data from different parts of the country especiallyfrom Faridabad, Haryana will help to precisely monitor and characterize the distributionof emerging bacterial pathogens and their AMR profile which are important for trackingchanges in resistance patterns in the microbes living in the environment over time and wouldbe of national and global priorities. This sewage-based surveillance is likely to providepredictive possibilities for many pathogens thereby providing important insights in publichealth policy. Assessing the pathogen load in the sewage water and identifying new kinds ofAMR functions and their genetic linkage with mobile genetic elements will reduce the risk ofany potential outbreaks of resistant pathogens.