Detection of Bioterrorism Agents with PM Technology

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Laboratories doing routine microbiology now must have tools that allow them to recognize and identify dangerous pathogens that could appear as part of their normal workflow. They need this capability to identify incipient bioterrorism attacks, to save lives of stricken people by rapid diagnosis, and to prevent the laboratory workers themselves from dangerous and uncontrolled exposures. Our proposal provides novel yet practical solutions to the real problems faced by microbiologists right now. Biolog will develop a highly advanced, bacterial identification system that can be used by any clinical microbiology laboratory to identify over 800 different bacterial species including bioterrorism microorganisms that could be used in an attack against humans or U.S. agriculture. This development is enabled by Biolog's newly developed, proprietary platform technology, Phenotype MicroArrays (PMs). PMs constitute a new genomic scale technology that gives unprecedented detailed information about the properties of live cells allowing scientists to test 2000 properties of a microbial cell simultaneously in a proprietary recording instrument called the OmniLog. The core technology is an image analysis system that detects changes in respiration of cells grown under different conditions. Because a large number of parameters are measured, an information-rich colorimetric pattern is generated for each bacterium, constituting a fingerprint of that bacterium. By testing a broad and representative collection of bacterial species in an automated high-throughput program, we will rapidly build a detailed database on phenotypic properties common to each bacterial species as well as properties that distinguish each species from its closest relatives. The database will be used to generate test panels capable of identifying over 800 species of both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria in a single test. This will improve the simplicity, speed, and accuracy of bacterial identification far beyond the technology available to medical labs at this time. We will also develop new, highly selective and specific enrichment and culture media that will allow investigators to monitor for bioterrorism microorganisms in the environment using standard, inexpensive, low tech agar plates.