News
ETH Medal 2025
Congratulations to Xiang Ge Luo for winning the ETH Medal 2025 for her doctoral thesis, “Modeling tumor mutation trees for evolution-guided precision oncology”! https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/entities/publication/a70802ed-0912-491f-86fb-0faf06281c93
Learning and forecasting selection dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 variants from wastewater sequencing data using Covvfit
We are excited to share that Covvfit is now published in Water Research. Covvfit is a method to estimate the selective advantage of viral variants using wastewater sequencing data. Using data from the Swiss SARS-CoV-2 surveillance, we show that it can reliably and efficiently estimate the advantage of emerging variants and forecast their spread. Read the full paper at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2026.126018.
Tracking SARS-CoV-2 genomic variants in wastewater sequencing data with LolliPop
We’re excited to share that LolliPop is now published in PLOS Computational Biology. LolliPop is a method for estimating the relative abundance of viral variants from wastewater sequencing data, used since 2021 as part of the Swiss national wastewater monitoring program. Read the article at: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014003.
Characterizing influenza A virus lineages and clinically relevant mutations through high-coverage wastewater sequencing
We’re happy to announce our study on tracing influenza A from wastewater. We developed a novel tiling amplicon approach, enabling deep genomic coverage of influenza A. The method allows for robust identification of circulating influenza A clades as well as vaccine-site and drug-target mutations, generating data that can inform public health interventions. Our method is now part of nationwide wastewater surveillance efforts: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135425013570 .