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

这项小型企业创新研究项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力源于新一代经济高效设备的开发和应用，这些设备可以近乎实时地有效地回收、保存和量化空气中的微生物。改善室内气溶胶微生物学特征的能力对城市社会具有许多重要的工程和公共卫生效益。这包括大大提高卫生保健机构监测生物气溶胶的能力；在被水破坏的建筑物中；在飞机/铁路/公共汽车运输中心；以及其他高密度的公共场所。通过这项工作，新兴的气溶胶技术将被优化并部署在便携式仪器中，这些仪器报告了目前市场上的气溶胶监测设备无法提供的东西：室内空气微生物的识别、分布和丰度。这种方法为编制大型暴露数据库提供了前所未有的途径，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工现场，将气溶胶数据传输到基于云的服务器，并以极高的保真度保存生物气溶胶样本。这些新一代仪器为测量我们每天呼吸的室内空气提供了一种创新的、不显眼的和实用的方法，几乎是实时的。这个STTR一期项目集成了便携式激光实时微生物计数，湿度控制，有效地从室内空气中回收细菌，真菌和花粉。这种先进的设备组件可以精确计数、保存和浓缩空气中的微生物，以进行与公共卫生相关的严格生化分析。这种新仪器的机会利用了它比传统采样设备具有的基本技术优势，传统采样设备到目前为止主要依赖于过滤大量室内空气。在传统的空气过滤过程中，微生物必须承受的机械应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通常栖息在室内环境中的空气微生物来挑战这种新型仪器阵列。使用广泛接受的工程和生物化学方法，总体目标是系统地验证这种新设备的效率，无论是在实验室还是在现场。我们预计空气中微生物活性和遗传物质（DNA）的定量恢复明显更好，直接与基于过滤器的对应物相比。因此，这种新型仪器的商业和社会价值是通过使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。

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.