The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-one-month research fellowship by Dr. Mary-Grace C. Danao to work with Dr. Todd Mottram at Silsoe Research Institute and David Cullen at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, United Kingdom.
Breath-monitoring is a non-invasive, safe, and easy approach to determining the general health status of humans and mammals. Current analytical methods used for breath analysis include gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, infrared analysis, and electronic noses - which have varying specificity to detect compounds with varying sensitivity in the parts per million or parts per billion levels. However, the size, cost, and complexity of these instruments make them unsuitable for routine in situ monitoring. The Pis will investigate the development of a sampling system and specific biosensor array to detect and analyse key analytes (biomarkers) in mammalian breath and breath condensate samples. The research aims to provide generic techniques for breath sampling and analysis and it will be implemented by an exemplar. A prime exemplar is identifying key breath markers of respiratory stress in horses. Specific aims of the research program include (1) identifying and quantifying volatile and non-volatile organic compounds in breath and breath condensate samples; (2) identifying biosensor technologies appropriate to the identified compounds, their dynamics, and cross-sensitivities of the sensors; (3) evaluating different extraction and pre-concentration techniques; (4) designing, building, and testing a bench-scale sensor array; (5) designing, building, and testing a laboratory breath output simulator to aid the development of a sensor array; and (6) validating the sensor array system using model and specific breath samples.
This research program leads to a general understanding of sampling and sensing of trace organic compounds in breath and future development of non-invasive systems for breath-based analysis of biomarkers of disease, health, and biosecurity.
