Measurement of Airborne DNA to Detect Arthropods Using Portable Particle Sampling

SHALLON MUTSA JOZI, Amira Hansch, Nicolas Gustafson, Scotty Yang, Roger Schürch, Gabriel Isaacman-VanWertz, Virginia Tech

     Abstract Number: 305
     Working Group: Bioaerosols in Agriculture: Sources, Risks and Mitigation

Abstract
Measurements of atmospheric constituents are often made with complex, expensive instrumentation that provides high chemical detail but is limited in its portability and requires high expense (e.g., mobile labs) for spatially resolved measurements. We recently demonstrated simple, portable devices that can sample with limited operator presence to enable temporally and/or spatially resolved measurements. In this work, we present a revised version of these new portable and programmable samplers for collection of atmospheric particles. We demonstrate simultaneous collection of samples across a spatially distributed network of transects across a targeted area, validate their reproducibility, and demonstrate their utility. Samples are analyzed for airborne eDNA contained within atmospheric particles. By using DNA metabarcoding to identify arthropod species from the collected samples, the presence of specific agricultural pests. Using a novel method for back-projection, we reconstruct a 2-dimensional map of insect locations from the time-integrated transects. This approach has the potential to revolutionize how agricultural pests are identified and located and biodiversity data is collected. Data presented here focuses on validation within constrained environments of known arthropod populations (i.e., bees), but extension to field conditions and agricultural pests will be discussed.