AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
The Effect of the Atlanta Urban Meteorological Variability in the Abundance and Behavior of Bioaerosols: A Fluorescence and Molecular Biology Approach
ARNALDO NEGRON-MARTY, Natasha DeLeon-Rodriguez, Samantha Waters, Luke Ziemba, Bruce Anderson, Michael Bergin, Konstantinos Konstantinidis, Athanasios Nenes, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract Number: 438 Working Group: Bioaerosols
Abstract The abundance of airborne cells (primary biological aerosols, PBAs) in the atmosphere has been of great interest due to their potential impact on human health and cloud formation. Over the years, the identification and quantification of microorganisms in the atmosphere has been a challenge. Previously, culture-dependent techniques and epifluorescence microscopy (EPM) have been the common methods for such studies, but each of these methods has its own inherent biases. Also, EPM requires long hours of analysis and there does not exist a standard means to distinguish major microbial taxa. As a result, other fluorescence techniques have been applied such as flow cytometry (FCM) and Wideband Integrated Bioaerosol Sensor (WIBS). To consider FCM as a reliable and sensitive technique to count airborne cells, Lange and colleagues (AEM, 1997) compared FCM and EPM. In recent years, several papers applied FCM but have been unsuccessful in separating microbial populations from one another. This work focuses on the development of an effective protocol for the identification and quantification of different types of PBAs by flow cytometry and the routine application of the protocol to study the effects of meteorological variability on the abundance and behavior of PBAs. Samples were collected using a SpinCon II in the urban Atlanta area and analyzed in an ACCURI C6 Flow Cytometer with the addition of SYTO-13 (green fluorescent nucleic acid stain). In parallel, WIBS measurements have been taken during the SpinCon II sampling times for comparison. The protocol is capable of discriminating between fungal spores, bacteria, and pollen, and quantifying microorganism abundance and dynamics over time. Furthermore, the consistency of the FCM protocol has been validated by its comparison with EPM and qPCR analysis on SpinCon II samples. Our results compare WIBS and flow cytometry results to better understand the seasonal variability of airborne microbial populations in the Atlanta area.