The pandemic changed the lives of countless people around the globe, but it also provided the opportunity to initiate and intensify collaborations with inspiring colleagues from all walks of science and to the establishment of waste water surveillance in Austria.
The pandemic provided the opportunity to initiate and intensify collaborations with inspiring colleagues from all walks of science including virology, immunology, evolution biology, biomathematics, infection epidemiology, modeling and public health. From January 2021 onwards, we intensified our collaboration with the AGES and began to sequence several hundred SARS-CoV-2 genomes per week. This amounted to more than 70% of all whole genomes sequenced in Austria by March 2022. Next to this, we strategically chose research topics of relevance and where our setup of sequencing and close interactions with all national stakeholders would proof valuable. This led to a study about fundamental properties of SARS-CoV-2 in the context of early superspreading events in Austria (Popa AM, Genger JM et al. Science Translational Medicine 2020). We also were blessed to collaborate with the Judith Aberle and Johannes Huppa laboratories (Medical University of Vienna) and contribute to questions on viral escape from CD8 T cell epitopes (Agerer B, Koblischke M, Gudipati V et al. Science Immunology 2021). Early on, we also focused our efforts on pathogen surveillance in wastewater. This turned out to be another demonstration of the strengths of interdisciplinary collaborations, as we broke new grounds towards the -until then for us entirely unknown- world of wastewater research. This was achieved together with the laboratories of Norbert Kreuzinger (TU Vienna), Heribert Insam (University of Innsbruck) and Herbert Oberacher (Medical University of Innsbruck). We contributed to the establishment of a national-wide surveillance of viral variants from wastewater in Austria and developed and validated new methodology to deconvolute SARS-CoV-2 variants from wastewater (Amman F, Markt R et al. bioRxiv 2022). This became part of a national surveillance system from wastewater. Beyond, we supported numerous collaborations which led to 12 co-authored publications and more pending.