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Jiménez-Díaz, Jaime

Civil and Environmental Engineering

2013

MS

Lung infections have a tremendous impact on public health worldwide, causing more disease than well-known threats to the public's health such as cancer, heart attack, stroke, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria. Typical diagnostic procedures for lung infection involve techniques for bacterial identification (e.g., culture, serological, and genetic methods), that are time consuming (taking hours to days) and may require invasive procedures such as sputum induction or bronchoalveolar lavage for isolating samples from patients. Therefore, an in situ test that is noninvasive, rapid, sensitive, and that facilitates timely and effective treatment decisions, is desired. Breath analysis could be an important non-invasive diagnostic method that can be used in the evaluation of health and diseases, especially related to the lower respiratory tract.
Our lab has developed a diagnostic method that uses Secondary Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry (SESI-MS) to detect the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in breath. By using SESI-MS, we have successfully differentiated the "breathprint" arising from several acute bacterial lung infections in mice, demonstrating the diagnostic potential ofthis technique.
The unique breathprints of each bacterial lung infection likely arise from both the bacterium and the host's immune response to the pathogen. The aim of this project is to correlate breathprint biomarkers to infectious physiological-immunological markers in order to identify the host-derived volatile peaks. A time-course experiment of acute murine lung infections with Pseudomonas aeruginosa was carried out, collecting breath volatiles and immune cells at 6, 12, 24, 48, 72, and 120 h post-infection. The putative host-derived volatile peaks were correlated to the immunological markers using statistical methods.