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For over a century, environmental engineers have attempted to control the prokaryotic community biological wastewater treatment processes, but there is growing interest in both understanding and harnessing the activity of phages in wastewater bioprocesses. While phages are known to be present and abundant, their ecological role, potential benefits, and impacts on wastewater biological processes are not fully understood. Fundamental knowledge on how phages infect host cells from relatively simple pure culture studies alongside environmental studies from marine and soil systems can be used to predict the potential impact of phages in diverse and dynamic wastewater environments. This frontier review is focused on what is known about the molecular mechanisms by which phages infect bacteria and how that could apply to biological process control and operation within wastewater treatment systems. Here, we specifically focus on highlights from studies on the molecular mechanisms that drive lysis and lysogeny within phage cells and the impacts on the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes and nutrient removal within a biological wastewater process. 

SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in wastewater is being rapidly developed and adopted as a public health monitoring tool worldwide. With wastewater surveillance programs being implemented across many different scales and by many different stakeholders, it is critical that data collected and shared are accompanied by an appropriate minimal amount of meta-information to enable meaningful interpretation and use of this new information source and intercomparison across datasets. While some databases are being developed for specific surveillance programs locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally, common globally-adopted data standards have not yet been established within the research community. Establishing such standards will require national and international consensus on what meta-information should accompany SARS-CoV-2 wastewater measurements. To establish a recommendation on minimum information to accompany reporting of SARS-CoV-2 occurrence in wastewater for the research community, the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Coordination Network on Wastewater Surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 hosted a workshop in February 2021 with participants from academia, government agencies, private companies, wastewater utilities, public health laboratories, and research institutes. This report presents the primary two outcomes of the workshop: (i) a recommendation on the set of minimum meta-information that is needed to confidently interpret wastewater SARS-CoV-2 data, and (ii) insights from workshop discussions on how to improve standardization of data reporting.