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On-site monitoring of airborne pathogens: recent advances in bioaerosol collection and rapid detection

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Abstract

Airborne pathogens pose a great threat to public health, and their appearance in bioaerosol also increases the contiguousness due to the long survival time and transmitting range. Real-time monitoring and rapid detection methods provide more effective prevention and control of airborne pathogens. The whole procedure could be divided into bioaerosol collection and detection processes. This review presents the basic principles and recent advances in commonly used methods for each of these two steps. We categorized four different kinds of collection methods based on their principles and discussed possible enrichment methods against a small amount of targets. Four different detection methods were compared regarding their ability to perform rapid testing. In the final section, we analyzed the latest trend in combining all these steps to set up a single device or platform for rapid, automated, and continuous on-site bioaerosol monitoring to overcome time and space constraints and increase the speed of the entire monitoring process. We conclude that an integrated all-in-one system using a microfluidic platform is the most promising solution for real-time monitoring of airborne pathogens, since they are capable of simplifying operational steps, efficient collection, and high-throughput detection, demonstrating the strong potential of field-deployable platforms.

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Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. C A method for detecting SARS-CoV-2 using LAMP and CRISPR/Cas12a technology that effectively avoids aerosol contamination from amplicon formation that may be caused by re-opening the lid after amplification (Chen et al., 2020). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. D A microfluidic microarray platform based on loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) that enables simultaneous and immediate testing of Streptococcus pneumoniae and Mycoplasma pneumoniae (Wang et al., 2019b). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. And E The RPA-Cas12a-based platform combined with digitized microfluidics (DMF) enables automated, rapid detection of influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2 (Sun et al., 2022). Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature

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Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society. C Yu et al., 2020. Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. D Li et al., 2022. Reproduced with permission from Frontiers. E Xiao et al., 2021. Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature. and F Seok et al., 2021. Reproduced with permission from MDPI

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Reproduced with permission from MDPI. B An electrochemical sensor was constructed utilizing the fact that the presence of the SARS-COV-2 antibody would interrupt the redox conversion of the redox indicator, resulting in a reduced current response (Yakoh et al., 2021). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. And C A device comprising a nanothick aluminum electrode structures integrated with picoliter trap arrays for dielectrophoresis-driven spore capture and on-chip quantitative detection using impedimetric sensing (Duarte et al., 2021). Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society

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Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. B A smartphone-based fluorescence microscope isolated and counted the immunoagglutinated particles on a paper chip for direct airborne detection of SARS-CoV-2 (Kim et al., 2022). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. And C Semiquantitative detection of Aspergillus niger spores based on immunofluorescence analysis (Li et al., 2018b). Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society

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Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature. B A biosensor combining the plasma photothermal effect and localized surface plasmon resonance sensing transduction (Qiu et al., 2020). Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society. C An optofluidic surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy platform for real-time detection of airborne microorganisms (Choi et al., 2020). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier. D A highly sensitive human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 protein (ACE2) functionalized silver nanotriangle (AgNT) array localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensor for rapid detection of coronaviruses (Yang et al., 2022). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier

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Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society. B Knowlton et al., 2018. Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature. C Chen et al., 2018. Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society. D Seok et al., 2021. Reproduced with permission from MDPI. And E Kim et al., 2016. Reproduced with permission from American Chemical Society

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Data availability is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC2600503) and the 26th Student Research Program of China Jiliang University (Nos. 2023X26095).

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. CL organized the structure of the paper and was in charge of modification of the writing. XF was in charge of collecting related papers and writing the initial draft. The other authors contributed in providing insight opinion in bioaerosol collection and detection industry and provided some related papers. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chenze Lu.

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This was a review study and did not require ethical approval.

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The study did not involve animal experiments and human subjects.

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Feng, X., Hu, P., Jin, T. et al. On-site monitoring of airborne pathogens: recent advances in bioaerosol collection and rapid detection. Aerobiologia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-024-09824-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-024-09824-y

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