AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Investigation of ATP-based Bioluminescence Effectiveness for Bioaerosol Quantification
TAEWON HAN, Ting Cai, Kelsey DuBois, Gediminas Mainelis, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Abstract Number: 122 Working Group: Bioaerosols: Characterization and Environmental Impact
Abstract There has been continuous interest in the development of methods for rapid quantification of biological agents sampled from ambient environments. In addition to numerous existing methods for analyzing bioaerosol samples, including impedimetry, piezoelectric biosensors, immunological methods, and nucleic acid based assays, an adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP)-based bioluminescence method could add another useful tool for rapid monitoring of microbial contamination. Here, the amount of bioluminescence is proportional to bioaerosol concentration. In our previous studies, we found a time window when the bioluminescence signal is consistent and is not affected by reagent decay. However, there is no information available on how the intensity of ATP-based bioluminescence reactions is affected by bioaerosol sampling methods, e.g., filtration, impingement or electrostatic precipitation. Thus, to further investigate the applicability of this method for bioaerosol applications, we analyzed the ratio of the relative luminescence units (RLU) of the reaction indicative of the total ATP content to cell counts by microscopy for different sampling methods: (1) Button Aerosol Sampler used with polycarbonate, PTFE, and cellulose nitrate filters, (2) BioSampler with 5 mL and 20 mL of collection liquid, and (3) our newly developed Electrostatic Precipitator with Superhydrophobic Surface (EPSS).
The results show that microorganism species commonly used as test particles in bioaerosol research, such as Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, and Pseudomonas fluorescens, may sustain a varying degree of stress and damage depending on the sampling method. All three samplers were tested at three different sampling periods (5, 15 and 60 minutes), respectively. Our findings also showed that extraction efficiency for each filter was crucially important and needs to be investigated separately for each filter type. The results of this study encourage the application of ATP-based bioluminescence in bioaerosol research and provide guidance for achieving maximum sensitivity when using different sampling techniques.