Design, Construction and Validation of a Nose-only Inhalation Exposure System to Study Infectivity of Filtered Bioaerosols in Mice

Efforts to measure the clinical significance of an antimicrobial resin incorporated in air filtration media marketed for use in personal respirators identified the need for a novel system to perform comparative animal inhalation studies using infective bioaerosols. An aerosol delivery system based on the Collison nebulizer and a 12-port, commercial apparatus for respiratory exposure of rodents was designed and engineered to deliver, at selectable concentrations, a respiratory challenge of bioaerosols through a filter exclusively to the noses of mice. Pathogenic bioaerosols can be passed in separate experiments through treated and untreated control filters to deliver a consistent challenge to a murine model of human respiration via a nose-only exposure, as a detector for antimicrobial effect. This system was validated and found to be capable of providing a sufficiently constant and controllable stream of viable bioaerosol for use in animal exposure trials. Published in Journal of Applied Microbiology, v113, 757-766, 2012.