Fully Integrated System for Pathogen Concentration and Detection in Water Supplies

Physical Sciences Inc. proposes an innovative, filter free approach to rapidly concentrate and detect bacterial spores from large volumes of flowing water for the purpose of early warning detection of contaminated potable water supplies against low concentration biological pathogens. Our approach builds on previous concentration work to study the feasibility of optimizing this approach and lays the foundation to build a fully integrated detection system in Phase II. We anticipate the following performance levels for the system: Single pass capture efficiencies of 50% or greater, concentration increase of >2000x, detection sensitivity to 1500 spores in water, total power consumption of <50W, no pressure drop across the filtration stage, no consumables or reagent costs, real-time notification, and an easily integrateable, flange-based housing design.