Establishing a universal model virus system for breath air aerosol studies, including an appropriate sampling system
Analytical Chemistry
Medical Microbiology and Mycology, Hygiene, Molecular Infection Biology
Final Report Abstract
When sneezing or coughing, air bursts through the nasal cavity and airways. This results in the expulsion of foreign bodies and the atomization of mucus into small droplet particles containing bacteria and viruses. Standard sampling methods for bioaerosols, active as well as passive, generally achieve insufficient sampling efficiency and are rarely able to preserve the viability of the analyte after sampling. The major problems encountered when sampling a bioaerosol are the small size, diversity, and fragility of the analyte and the relatively low concentration of bioaerosol in indoor and outdoor environments. In this project, we constructed a sampling device for an efficient and gentle sampling of aerosols with the included bacteria and viruses. A water-based condensation growth tube increases the size of droplets. Thus, the organisms’ viability is preserved, and the sampling efficiency is improve. Initial tests were performed using a sodium chloride and artificial saliva aerosol. Finite Element (FEM) simulations (COMSOL Multiphysics 6.2) accompanied the experimental work. Beyond developing a prototype sampling system, this project establishes a complete simulation tool for developing aerosol sampling devices of different sizes and flow rates. The second part of this work was the development of a Real-Time PCR assay to detect the Torque Teno Virus (TTV) in various human samples. A consensus target sequence was extracted from the most conserved UTR region of well-described TTV genotypes. Based on that consensus sequence, primers and probes were designed and tested with positive and negative controls as well as human samples from an INSTAND ring trail.
