AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
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Condensation Particle Growth for Improved Delivery of Nanoaerosols to Air-Liquid Interface Cell Culture
TREVOR TILLY, Jiva Luthra, Sarah Robinson, Arantzazu Eiguren Fernandez, Gregory Lewis, Saber Hussain, Tara Sabo-Attwood, Chang-Yu Wu, University of Florida
Abstract Number: 771 Working Group: Aerosol Exposure
Abstract An efficient particle delivery system has been designed for the characterization of submicron particles. Using water-based condensational growth technology, particles as small as 10 nm are amplified to droplets greater than 3 µm allowing them to be counted by optical measures. Furthermore, this technology has been transitioned as an efficient means for collecting viable virus and bacteria aerosols in a sampler known as a growth tube collector (GTC). The temperature, 37 ºC, and humid environment used by the GTC for particle collection makes the sampler ideal for delivering particle aerosols to air-liquid interface cell cultures for toxicity evaluation. 3D printing was used to adapt the GTC to support air-liquid interface cell culture; in this design, four wells can be simultaneously exposed to evaluate variations and obtain statistically relevant results. Particle deposition efficiency, and intra- and inter-well variability was determined by aerosolizing fluorescein and quantifying the amount deposited in each well using fluorometry. Three fluorescein aerosol particle concentrations of 60,000, 150,000, 210,000 #/cm3 were used to test the controllability in depositing particles for sampling periods varying between 5 and 20 minutes. Each sampling condition was run in triplicate. The standard deviation of the deposited dose was below 0.01 for each of the exposure conditions and their triplicate trials, with 9 of the 12 timepoints of the three conditions being below 0.005. Testing results showed that the delivered dose of fluorescein to the cell membranes was linearly related to exposure concentration and time. The high efficiency of the GTC for delivering particles to cells results in dosing concentrations ranging from 177 ng/cm2 to 2.93 µg/cm2 in under 20 minutes. Therefore, particle deposition to cells can be carefully controlled in the GTC to provide a flexible method to evaluate the toxicity of aerosol exposures.