Conducting military operations in an environment containing biowarfare agents requires sophisticated and rapid laboratory tools to develop and test suitable decontaminants. Flow cytometers are useful in R&D and clinical laboratories because of their ability to obtain spectroscopic information from large numbers of individual cells or beads. A custom-built, autonomous flow cytometer is proposed to monitor the efficacy of numerous candidate liquid decontaminants against bacterial pathogens and their toxins. A novel robust device is proposed that will reduce the size of the optical interrogation spot to accommodate the small size of bacteria. Other proposed methods take advantage of microfluidic flow cells and sensitive detection techniques. All equipment will utilize a sample carrousel to facilitate the automated analysis of a large number of candidate decontamination agents. Unfortunately, a single preparative assay is not universally adaptable to determining the efficacy of decontamination procedures for bacteria (vegetative and nonvegetative) and their toxins. ACIS proposes a unique assay for bacteria, spores and toxins. The proposed methods provide time-dependent quantitative measures of a decontamination agent's effectiveness. The project will conclude with a final report describing the performance of both the equipment and the assays and recommendations for future work to be considered for Phase II. In addition to military applications, the same technology will be useful in combating bioterrorism on the homefront and will be routinely used by the pharmaceutical industry (to develop antibiotics and antimicrobial agents) and by manufacturers of consumer cleaning products and be the foundation for commercial biomonitoring equipment.
Keywords: bacteria, flow cytometer, decontamination, toxins, assay, microfluidics, spore, biowarfare
