Abstract Number: 113 Working Group: Aerosols and Health - Connecting the Dots
Abstract In the past, toxicology studies are most offline, thus being not able to track the in situ responses of animals or humans to airborne pollutant exposure. Here, we report a system called dLABer that allows us to real-time monitor the breath-borne biomarkers. The system integrates living animals or humans, breath sampling, microfluidics, and biosensor. To test the dLABer, rats injected with PM were used as the subjects in this work. Our data showed that the dLABer were able to report IL-6 after 60 minutes from the breath sampling and can distinguish the different health effects caused by PM collected from different global cities based on the breath-borne IL-6 level. The results from the dLABer system were further validated using the ELISA for the air samples collected. In addition, the results from blood samples from the rats injected with different PM samples (the same mass) and also the DTT results agreed well with those from the dLABer system for breath-borne biomarker. In addition, video recordings also showed that rats exposed to PM with higher toxicity appeared to be less active, which was in line with the dLABer results. All the data (breath-borne, blood sera and DTT) suggested that the dLABer system can be used to real-time monitor breath-borne biomarkers. Results showed that the the dLABer were more sensitive than the traditional method ELISA, while the quantitative analysis capability of dLABer needs to be further improved. Here, we only tested the system for detecting biomarkers resulting from PM exposure, and in the future the dLABer system can be also used to detect the biomarkers resulting from the use of medications. Also, the system can be immediately used to monitor breath-borne biomarkers from humans in various scenarios. This work leads to a frontier method that is expected to revolutionize the pollutant health effects studies as well as many breath-borne disease diagnosis and studies.