AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Making the "Invisible" Visible: Aerosol Collection into a Liquid followed by Concentration of the Sample for Rapid Microbiological Methods
DAVID ALBURTY, Michael Hornback, Andrew Page, Ann Packingham, InnovaPrep LLC
Abstract Number: 376 Working Group: Bioaerosols
Abstract A tangential slit wetted cyclone (SpinCon II, InnovaPrep) was used to collect aerosolized washed Bacillus atrophaeus endospores from an aerosol test chamber at low aerosol concentrations into ~10 mL of sterile water. A one mL aliquot of the liquid sample was split for analysis. Half of the sample was used for traditional culture, whereas the other half mL was prepared for analysis using bead beating (OmniLyse, Claremont Biosolutions) and analyzed by qPCr (Step One, Applied Biosystems). In parallel, the remaining portion of the liquid sample was concentrated (Concentrating Pipette, InnovaPrep) and eluted in 250 microliters of clean buffer. The concentrated sample was split, with half used for traditional culture, and half prepared for analysis using bead beating and analyzed by qPCR. The results were compared and showed that a concentration factor of ~24X was applied to the initially collected sample using this process. Application of known collection and retention efficiencies (Murowchick, 2015) of the wetted cyclone are summarized for application to the design of environmental aerosol studies or for biodefense purposes.