Size Amplification Sensing of Bacteria Encapsulated by Polymer Colloids for Achieving Total and Specific Particle Counting

Microbial aerosols pose a serious threat to public health and safety due to their pathogenicity and need to be monitored quantitatively. Although evaluating airborne particulate pollution by size/number is the gold standard for atmospheric assessment, it cannot be applied to microbial aerosol detection because impurities of similar size interfere. Therefore, we propose an innovative detection method that amplifies the size signal of bacterial cells via colloidal encapsulation to count microbial aerosols in the “clean-size-range”. This method can detect total microbial aerosols after cell surface engineering and detect special microbial aerosols by grafting bacteria-templated polymers. The detection sensitivity can reach 50 CFU/mL in water and 6 CFU/m 3 in air. This work provides an innovative approach to the total and specific detection of microbial aerosols by “transforming complex microbial aerosols detection into simple polymer particle counting”. This innovative approach can achieve precise microbial detection in complex particulate environments.