The Department of Chemical Engineering and Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology , Haifa 3200003, Israel.
Anal Chem. 2013 Nov 19;85(22):11146-52. doi: 10.1021/ac403134f. Epub 2013 Nov 8.
Brucellosis is of great public health and economic importance worldwide. Detection of brucellosis currently relies on serologic testing of an antibody response to Brucella infection, which suffers from cross-sensitivities to other antibody responses. Here we present a new method for identifying Brucella exposure that is based on profiling volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath. Breath samples from Brucella-seropositive bison and controls were chemically analyzed and demonstrated statistically significant differences in the concentration profiles of five VOCs. A point-of-care device incorporating an array of nanomaterial-based sensors could identify VOC patterns indicative of Brucella exposure with excellent discriminative power, using a statistical algorithm. We show that the patterns were not affected by the animals' environment and that the discriminative power of the approach was stable over time. The Brucella-indicative VOCs and collective patterns that were identified in this pilot study could lead to the development of a novel diagnostic screening test for quickly detecting infected animals chute-side, pen-side, or even remotely in populations of free-ranging ungulates. The promising preliminary results presented encourage subsequent larger scale trials in order to further evaluate the proposed method.
布鲁氏菌病在全球范围内具有重要的公共卫生和经济意义。目前，布鲁氏菌病的检测依赖于对布鲁氏菌感染的抗体反应进行血清学检测，但这种方法存在与其他抗体反应交叉敏感的问题。在这里，我们提出了一种新的方法来识别布鲁氏菌暴露，该方法基于分析呼出气中挥发性有机化合物（VOC）的特征。对布鲁氏菌血清阳性野牛和对照的呼吸样本进行了化学分析，结果表明，五种 VOC 的浓度特征存在统计学显著差异。一种基于纳米材料传感器阵列的即时检测设备可以使用统计算法识别出指示布鲁氏菌暴露的 VOC 模式，具有出色的区分能力。我们表明，这些模式不受动物环境的影响，并且该方法的区分能力在一段时间内是稳定的。在这项初步研究中确定的布鲁氏菌指示性 VOC 和集体模式可能会导致开发一种新的诊断筛选测试，以便快速检测受感染动物的 chute-side、pen-side，甚至在自由放养的有蹄类动物群体中进行远程检测。有希望的初步结果鼓励随后进行更大规模的试验，以进一步评估该方法。
