#MSCA #COFUND Fellow of the Week Special edition !
© 2020 EPFL
Congratulation Xavi !
Xavier is a postdoctoral researcher with fundamental training in biology, food science and microbiology. He obtained a BSc in Biology (Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona, 2007) as well as a BSc in Food Science (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2010), for which he received a Best Marks Degree Award. After completing his MSc in Advanced Microbiology (Universitat de Barcelona, 2012), he started his PhD in Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology (Universitat de Barcelona), where he researched the application of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques to study viruses that contaminate water and food. He has successfully characterized the virome of a wide array of environmental matrices (sewage, river water), foods (mussels, vegetables) and clinical samples (human sera and feces). His thesis was defended in 2017 with a Cum Laude distinction. He then enrolled in the EU-FORA fellowship program from the European Foods Safety Authority, where he studied microbiological hazards of novel food products (edible crickets) as a guest researcher in the University of Agricultural Sciences of Sweden (Uppsala).
Currently, Xavier is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow within the Eurotech programme at the Environmental Engineering Institute (IIE) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. His project is entitled “METAVIR: Untargeted metaviromics to characterize the infective sewage virome: a step toward to safe potable water reuse”. The goal of this project is to develop sensitive NGS protocols that allow the identification of infective human viruses in sewage. The application of these tools has the potential to identify, under a single analysis, all the possible viral hazards presents in sewage. This information is relevant to optimize the treatment of wastewater for safe reuse, for example to irrigate crops or to produce drinking water via direct potable reuse.
Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scope of the project has been widened. Since February, he has been a member of a multidisciplinary Swiss team working to track the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in sewage. In the context of COVID-19, sewage is a particularly interesting matrix. It captures SARS-CoV-2 shed by a very large population, and it captures it early on in the disease, likely before any clinical tests are performed. Monitoring this virus using sewage can therefore 1) help provide a better estimate of the number of COVID-19 cases in the population, and 2) serve as an early warning system for a second COVID-19 wave. Ultimately, sewage monitoring, in combination with the improved of viral metaviromics techniques developed in the METAVIR project may help identify new viruses circulating in the population, thereby minimizing the impact of future pandemics caused by different viral pathogens.
This is Xavier’s insight as MSCA fellow:
“This project has allowed me to pursue and develop my own research ideas while pushing my boundaries. It has given me the opportunity to better understand all the stages of a research project, from grant writing to experimental work to data management. I am extremely grateful for this opportunity which surely will represent an inflection point in my scientific career”
Learn more about Xavier and his research:
Website: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lce/
Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/zavviako