Development of an elution device for ViroCap virus filters

Christine Susan Fagnant,Yifei Guan,Igor Novosselov,John Adolphsen,Byron Ockerman,John Scott Meschke,Jeffry Hiroshi Shirai,Nicolette Angela Zhou,Matthew Toles,David S Boyle,Jacob Powell

doi:10.1007/s10661-017-6258-y

Abstract

Environmental surveillance of waterborne pathogens is vital for monitoring the spread of diseases, and electropositive filters are frequently used for sampling wastewater and wastewater-impacted surface water. Viruses adsorbed to electropositive filters require elution prior to detection or quantification. Elution is typically facilitated by a peristaltic pump, although this requires a significant startup cost and does not include biosafety or cross-contamination considerations. These factors may pose a barrier for low-resource laboratories that aim to conduct environmental surveillance of viruses. The objective of this study was to develop a biologically enclosed, manually powered, low-cost device for effectively eluting from electropositive ViroCap™ virus filters. The elution device described here utilizes a non-electric bilge pump, instead of an electric peristaltic pump or a positive pressure vessel. The elution device also fully encloses liquids and aerosols that could contain biological organisms, thereby increasing biosafety. Moreover, all elution device components that are used in the biosafety cabinet are autoclavable, reducing cross-contamination potential. This device reduces costs of materials while maintaining convenience in terms of size and weight. With this new device, there is little sample volume loss due to device inefficiency, similar virus yields were demonstrated during seeded studies with poliovirus type 1, and the time to elute filters is similar to that required with the peristaltic pump. The efforts described here resulted in a novel, low-cost, manually powered elution device that can facilitate environmental surveillance of pathogens through effective virus recovery from ViroCap filters while maintaining the potential for adaptability to other cartridge filters.

Highlights

Environmental surveillance (ES), or the process of sampling and analyzing environmental samples such as water, air, or surfaces, can provide key information regarding the presence and distribution of pathogens such as viruses
This study describes a comparative analysis of the peristaltic pump method and two manually powered elution device designs for the effective elution of poliovirus from ViroCap filters
The peristaltic pump (Fig. 2 (b)) applied positive pressure to the ViroCap filter inlet, which resulted in compressed air being released from the filter inlet into the air after elution

Summary

Introduction

Environmental surveillance (ES), or the process of sampling and analyzing environmental samples such as water, air, or surfaces, can provide key information regarding the presence and distribution of pathogens such as viruses. 574 Page 2 of 10 tracked with greater resolution This enables a clearer understanding of vaccine coverage, viral distribution, and persistence, and aids surveillance efforts when compared to clinical symptomatic observations alone (Battistone et al 2014; La Rosa et al 2014; Murray et al 2013; World Health Organization 2015; Yanez et al 2014; Cowger et al 2017). In the instance of poliovirus, ES is key for declaring eradication, as it will help to ensure that the virus does not reemerge in the wild (Hovi et al 2012; Lopalco 2017; World Health Organization 2015; Asghar et al 2014; Cowger et al 2017)

Objectives

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Results

Conclusion