AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
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Comparison of RNA Analyses with Plaque Assays for Evaluating Virus Aerosol Collection Efficiency
Xiao Jiang, Maohua Pan, Susanne Hering, John Lednicky, CHANG-YU WU, Hugh Fan, University of Florida
Abstract Number: 684 Working Group: Bioaerosols
Abstract The spread of virus-induced infectious diseases through airborne transmission is a global concern for economic and medical reasons. To better understand virus transmission modes, it is essential to have an effective aerosol collector such as the growth tube collector (GTC) system that utilizes water-based laminar-flow condensation for collecting virus-containing aerosols. In this work we characterized the GTC system using bacteriophage MS2 as a surrogate for small RNA viruses. With the methods of RNA extraction and reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and the plaque assay (culturing collected virus samples), we evaluated the GTC system for its virus collection efficiency, and compared it with a commercially available apparatus SKC® Biosampler. The plaque assay reported only viable viruses collected whereas RT-PCR analyzed total viruses, including those viruses inactivated during collection. The results show that the GTC had collection efficiency of viable viruses between 0.24 – 1.8% and total collection efficiency between 18.3 – 79.0%, which was 1 - 2 orders of magnitude higher than the SKC® Biosampler. The results illustrate that the nebulization process using the Collison nebulizer deactivated the majority of MS2 viruses. Higher relative humidity (RH) significantly increased both the total collection efficiency and the efficiency for viable viruses of the GTC while its effect on the collection efficiency of SKC® Biosampler was not significant.