![]() ![]() Most commercial bioaerosol samplers operate at relatively low flow rates, Puthussery said, while the team’s monitor has a flow rate of about 1,000 liters per minute, making it one of the highest flow-rate devices available. “The high virus recovery by the wet cyclone can be attributed to its extremely high flow rate, which allows it to sample a larger volume of air over a 5-minute sample collection compared with commercially available samplers.” ![]() “The challenge with airborne aerosol detectors is that the level of virus in the indoor air is so diluted that it even pushes toward the limit of detection of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Chakrabarty said. The wet cyclone sampler has an automated pump that collects the fluid and sends it to the biosensor for seamless detection of the virus using electrochemistry. Air enters the sampler at very high velocities and gets mixed centrifugally with the fluid that lines the walls of the sampler to create a surface vortex, thereby trapping the virus aerosols. “SARS-CoV-2 binds to the nanobodies on the surface, and we can induce oxidation of tyrosines on the surface of the virus using a technique called square wave voltammetry to get a measurement of the amount of virus in the sample.”Ĭhakrabarty and Puthussery integrated the biosensor into an air sampler that operates based on the wet cyclone technology. “The nanobody-based electrochemical approach is faster at detecting the virus because it doesn’t need a reagent or a lot of processing steps,” Yuede said. The nanobody is small, easy to reproduce and modify and inexpensive to make, the researchers said. David Brody, MD, PhD, a former faculty member in the Department of Neurology at the School of Medicine and an author on the paper, developed the nanobody in his lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). To convert the biosensor from detecting amyloid beta to coronavirus, the researchers exchanged the antibody that recognizes amyloid beta for a nanobody from llamas that recognizes the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. ![]() They reached out to Chakrabarty, who assembled a team that included Puthussery, who had expertise in building real-time instruments to measure the toxicity of air. The idea with this device is that you can know essentially in real time, or every 5 minutes, if there is a live virus.”Ĭirrito and Yuede had previously developed a micro-immunoelectrode (MIE) biosensor that detects amyloid beta as a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease and wondered if it could be converted into a detector for SARS-CoV-2. “If you are in a room with 100 people, you don’t want to find out five days later whether you could be sick or not. “There is nothing at the moment that tells us how safe a room is,” Cirrito said. Jolley Career Development Associate Professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering in McKelvey Engineering Joseph Puthussery, a postdoctoral research associate in Chakrabarty’s lab John Cirrito, a professor of neurology at the School of Medicine and Carla Yuede, an associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine.
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