AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Use of Breath-Borne Biomarkers for in Vivo Monitoring Air Toxicity
HAOXUAN CHEN, Xinyue Li, Maosheng Yao, Peking University
Abstract Number: 793 Working Group: Meet the Job Seekers
Abstract Many substances in the air are harmful to human health, such as PM, ozone, biaerosols etc. Therefore, human are confronting synthetical threats from the air and the real-time monitoring of air toxicity is cruicial and necessary, which however is a long-standing challenge in the field. The present practice are usually performed by online monitoring single or several already-known toxicants, which fails to provide overall information about the air safety. Besides, toxicology studies are most offline, thus being not able to track the in situ responses of animals or humans to airborne toxicants exposure.
Recently, exhaled breath is increasingly being used as a noninvasive biomarker in environmental health studies. In addition to its non-invasive property, the exhaled breath can be continuously obtained which makes it possible to real-time reflect air toxicity. Here, we reported a system called dLABer that allows us to real-time monitor the breath-borne biomarkers. The system integrates living animals, breath sampling and detection module. To test the dLABer, rats exposed to different kinds of air pollutants and toxicants were used as the subjects. Our data showed that the dLABer were able to online report different types of biomarkers in exhaled breath of rats after exposure to different toxicants. Based on breath-borne biomarker levels, the system can not only distinguish the different toxicity of PM collected from different global cities, but can also served as a direct monitor of the overall air toxicity. In the future, the system can be used to monitor the biomarkers in many other scenarios. This work leads to a frontier method that is expected to pioneer the air toxicity monitoring as well as many breath-borne disease diagnosis and studies.