Sample Prep Part 6

Slide 16 shows InnovaPrep’s new ACD-200 “Bobcat” aerosol collector.  The ACD stands for Aerosol collector, Dry.  The 200 is because it operates at 200 liters per minute aerosol collection rate.  The Bobcat aerosol collector could also be called an air sampler.  Dry filter air collectors are nothing new.  The problem with them has always been how to harvest the collected particles in a quick, efficient and useful way.  Continue…

 Sample Prep (part 5)

You are right.  Rapid Methods have been the focus for many years now.  Time is always of the essence.  Advances in biotechnology and automation have improved production and bio-analytical work flow (Slide 13, 14).  You are probably using some of these systems now; but they were almost unimaginable only 10 years ago.  “Lab on a chip” was derided as a dream, but it’s coming true. Continue…

There are many really great sample prep techniques out there for biological samples.  Many are “affinity-based,” meaning that they take advantage of some kind of binding effect between the bioparticles and some kind of “handle.”  These kinds of processes can not only concentrate biological samples, they can help purify them and get rid of interferents that spoil the identification method.  Of course, this is pretty difficult and expensive if the sample is very large (more than about a milliliter) because a lot of expensive reagents would be needed.  At least a dozen great examples of this sort of method were presented at this conference. 

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Sample Prep Part 3

The concentration process is very scalable.  Still, there is a “sweet spot” of about 1000X concentration per stage.  To begin with, this is because there are tradeoffs based on the size of the concentration cells, and the size of your sample.   For a given concentration cell, the initial sample can be up to about a thousand times bigger than the final concentrated volume.  If the initial input volume is 100 liters of drinking water, the cell will be pretty big and the output volume might be 50 to 100 milliliters or so (Slide 11). Continue…

Sample Prep part 2

 We are particle people.  We consider that our job begins by collecting particles; from air, surfaces, and liquids.  Then, we deliver the particles for detection or identification as the case may be, in the best possible way.  So, to collect the particles we build aerosol inlets, aerosol collectors of different kinds, surface samplers, and water samplers.  For the best possible sample delivery to detectors and identifiers, we build the concentrators (Slide 7).  The concentrator forms the link between the real-world sample volumes and the micro-volumes required by the modern identifiers that we described earlier. Continue…

 Sample Prep part 1

We first saw the need for biological sample concentration in the world of Biodefense.  Our background expertise is in biodefense, especially biodefense technology development and testing.  Some of the hardest problems to solve are bioaerosol collection and identification of threats.  We were focusing on those issues when we realized that many of the best bioaerosol collectors either concentrated aerosols into a liquid, or captured the aerosols dry – but transferred the samples to a liquid for analysis and threat identification using the newest hot-rod biological identifiers.  Continue…