Research advances in microfluidic collection and detection of virus, bacterial, and fungal bioaerosols

Abstract

Bioaerosols are airborne suspensions of fine solid or liquid particles containing biological substances such as viruses, bacteria, cellular debris, fungal spores, mycelium, and byproducts of microbial metabolism. The global Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the previous emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and influenza have increased the need for reliable and effective monitoring tools for bioaerosols. Bioaerosol collection and detection have aroused considerable attention. Current bioaerosol sampling and detection techniques suffer from long response time, low sensitivity, and high costs, and these drawbacks have forced the development of novel monitoring strategies. Microfluidic technique is considered a breakthrough for high performance analysis of bioaerosols. In recent years, several emerging methods based on microfluidics have been developed and reported for collection and detection of bioaerosols. The unique advantages of microfluidic technique have enabled the integration of bioaerosol collection and detection, which has a higher efficiency over conventional methods. This review focused on the research progress of bioaerosol collection and detection methods based on microfluidic techniques, with special attention on virus aerosols and bacterial aerosols. Different from the existing reviews, this work took a unique perspective of the targets to be collected and detected in bioaerosols, which would provide a direct index of bioaerosol categories readers may be interested in. We also discussed integrated microfluidic monitoring system for bioaerosols. Additionally, the application of bioaerosol detection in biomedicine was presented. Finally, the current challenges in the field of bioaerosol monitoring are presented and an outlook given of future developments. Graphical abstract: (Figure presented.)