Bacterial viability and air quality: experimental approach and results at the atmospheric simulation chamber ChAMBRe.

Abstract

Bio-aerosols consist of airborne particles such as pollens, fungi, bacteria, viruses and debris from biological matter, such as metabolites and toxins, that are present ubiquitously in the environment. In last decades, the interest in bioaerosols has increased rapidly to broaden the pool of knowledge on their identification, quantification, distribution, but also to understand how bioaerosols impact human health in both indoor and outdoor settings. Experiments conducted inside confined artificial environments, such as the Atmospheric Simulations Chambers (ASCs), where atmospheric conditions and composition are controlled, can provide valuable information on bio-aerosol viability, dispersion, and impact. At ChAMBRe (Chamber for Aerosol Modelling and Bio-aerosol Research), a 2.3 m3 stainless steel ASC, managed by INFN at the Physics Department of the University of Genoa, Italy, the research on bioaerosol is focused on the investigation of the airborne bacteria behavior in different atmospheric conditions (Massabò et al., AMT, 2018). Our experiments were performed with two types of bacteria, Bacillus Subtilis and Escherichia Coli evolutionarily divergent model organisms, Gram-negative and Gram-positive respectively, to compare cellular viability by varying of the atmospheric conditions in the simulation chambre. A great effort has been put in the assessment of an experimental protocol which includes bacteria cultivation, injection in the chamber of viable cells, exposure to peculiar environmental conditions and final verification of the loss/gain in viability. With first experiments, bacteria were exposed to high concentration of characterized soot particles (Black carbon ~ 600 μg m-3) and NOx exhausts, both produced by propane combustion (Vernocchi et al., 2021). The effects of NOx only were also separately investigated, in another set of experiments, in which different concentration of NOx were tested. Evidence of an impact of NOx concentration on the viability of the Gram-negative Bacillus Subtilis were observed and will be fully reported at the conference.