A PATHOGEN-SAFE SORTER FOR THE CENTER FOR FOOD SAFETY ENGINEERING AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY

The application is to fund a new pathogen cell sorter. We defined three key focused areas of cell-sorting application, plus one group of general FC use scenarios across the group of 21 faculty supporting this proposal and focused on some of these below: Rapid, safe sorting of pathogens directly onto a variety of testing/culturing environments (chambers, paper assays strips, multi-well plates, Petri dishes, and test tubes). This need is directly related to the design, development, and testing of pathogen detection and recognition systems. Use of sophisticated separation algorithms (spectral unmixing and machine learning) for high-purity separation of single organisms used in the downstream genomic analysis (PCR,16S-RNA,10X chips) Sorting viable but non-culturable organisms (including pathogens) from complex biomes in an attempt to identify the mixtures, composition, and organism interactions. Various cell sorting tasks requiring biocontainment: sorting cell lines contaminated with potentially dangerous organisms. These include sorting cells infected with viruses and performing spectral analysis for the separation of multiple sub-populations.