STTR Phase I: New devices for the rapid and accurate characterization of airborne microbes

STTR 第一阶段：快速准确表征空气微生物的新设备

• 批准号: 1721940
• 负责人: Patricia Keady
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Aerosol Devices Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-07-01 至 2018-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1721940&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: STTR; Phase; New; devices; rapid

The broader reaching impacts/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research project stems from the development and application of a new generation of cost-effective devices that can efficiently recover, preserve and quantify airborne microbes in near real time. An improved ability to characterize the microbiology of indoor aerosols has a multitude of important engineering and public health benefits for urban society. This includes a vastly improved ability to monitor bioaerosols in health care settings; in water-damaged buildings; in plane/rail/bus transportation centers; as well as other high-density public venues. Through this work, emerging aerosol technology will be optimized and deployed in portable instrumentation that reports what currently marketed aerosol monitoring equipment cannot provide: the identity, distribution and abundance of airborne microorganisms indoors. This approach provides an unprecedented path to compile large exposure databases, which enable the scientific and medical community to better understand the potential effects of indoor microbial air pollution. Compared to conventional aerosol sampling, these new filter-less devices require little human oversite, communicate aerosol data to cloud-based servers, and preserve bioaerosol samples with exceptional fidelity. These next generation instruments provide an innovative, unobtrusive and practical method for surveying the indoor air we breathe every day, in near real-time.This STTR Phase I project integrates portable lasers for real-time microbe enumeration, with humidity controls that efficiently recover bacteria, fungi and pollen from indoor air. This advanced equipment assembly accurately counts, preserves and concentrates airborne microbes for stringent biochemical analysis that is relevant to public health. The opportunity for this new instrumentation leverages the fundamental technological advantages it has over conventional sampling equipment, which until now predominantly relies on filtering large quantities of indoor air. The mechanical stresses microbes must endure during conventional air filtration, seriously compromises the accuracy of airborne microbial analyses. The research objective of this work is to challenge this novel instrumentation array with known quantities of airborne microbes that commonly inhabit the indoor environment. Using widely accepted engineering and biochemistry methods, the overarching goal is to systematically validate the efficiency of this new equipment, both in the laboratory and in the field. We anticipate markedly better quantitative recovery of airborne microbial activity and genetic material (DNA) where directly compared to its filter-based counterparts. Thus, the commercial and societal value of this new instrumentation is realized through displacing outmoded aerosol collection methods with highly efficient filter-less air sampling devices, outfitted with modern optics and digital automation.

这个小型企业创新研究项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力源于新一代经济高效设备的开发和应用，这些设备可以有效地回收、保存和近乎实时地量化空气中的微生物。室内气溶胶微生物学表征能力的提高对城市社会有许多重要的工程和公共健康益处。这包括在卫生保健环境、被水破坏的建筑物、飞机/铁路/公共汽车运输中心以及其他高密度公共场所监测生物气溶胶的能力大大提高。通过这项工作，新兴的气溶胶技术将得到优化，并部署在便携式仪器中，报告目前市场上的气溶胶监测设备无法提供的信息：室内空气中微生物的身份、分布和丰富程度。这种方法提供了一条前所未有的途径来汇编大型暴露数据库，使科学界和医学界能够更好地了解室内微生物空气污染的潜在影响。与传统的气溶胶采样相比，这些新的无过滤器设备几乎不需要人在现场，将气溶胶数据传输到基于云的服务器，并以非凡的保真度保存生物气溶胶样本。这些新一代仪器为我们提供了一种创新、低调和实用的方法，可以近乎实时地测量我们每天呼吸的室内空气。这个STTR第一阶段项目将便携式激光用于实时微生物计数，并带有湿度控制，可以有效地从室内空气中回收细菌、真菌和花粉。这一先进的设备组件精确地计数、保存和浓缩空气中的微生物，以进行与公众健康相关的严格生化分析。这种新仪器的机会利用了它相对于传统采样设备的基本技术优势，到目前为止，传统采样设备主要依赖于过滤大量室内空气。微生物在常规空气过滤过程中必须承受的机械压力，严重影响了空气微生物分析的准确性。这项工作的研究目标是用已知数量的空气传播微生物来挑战这种新型仪器阵列，这些微生物通常生活在室内环境中。使用被广泛接受的工程和生物化学方法，首要目标是在实验室和现场系统地验证这种新设备的效率。我们预计空气中微生物活性和遗传物质(DNA)的定量恢复明显好于其基于过滤器的同行。因此，这种新仪器的商业和社会价值是通过用配备现代光学和数字自动化的高效无过滤器空气采样设备取代过时的气溶胶收集方法来实现的。