Part of the group’s work was devising a way to deliver airborne virus particles to the sensor.
With bird flu, says Rajan Chakrabarty, a professor of energy, environmental, and chemical engineering at Washington University and lead author of the paper, “the bad apple is surrounded by a million or a billion good apples.” He adds, “The challenge was to take an airborne pathogen and get it into a liquid form to sample.”
The team accomplished this by designing a microwave-size box that sucks in large volumes of air and spins it in a cyclone-like motion so that particles stick to liquid-coated walls. The process seamlessly produces a liquid drip that is pumped to the highly sensitive biosensor.
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