Deformability Assessment of Waterborne Protozoa Using a Microfluidic-Enabled Force Microscopy Probe

John S McGrath, Jos Quist, James R T Seddon, Stanley C S Lai, Serge G Lemay and Helen L Bridle

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: Many modern filtration technologies are incapable of the complete removal of Cryptosporidium oocysts from drinking-water. Consequently, Cryptosporidium-contaminated drinking-water supplies can severely implicate both water utilities and consumers. Existing methods for the detection of Cryptosporidium in drinking-water do not discern between non-pathogenic and pathogenic species, nor between viable and non-viable oocysts. Using FluidFM, a novel force spectroscopy method employing microchannelled cantilevers for single-cell level manipulation, we assessed the size and deformability properties of two species of Cryptosporidium that pose varying levels of risk to human health. A comparison of such characteristics demonstrated the ability of FluidFM to discern between Cryptosporidium muris and Cryptosporidium parvum with 86% efficiency, whilst using a measurement throughput which exceeded 50 discrete oocysts per hour. In addition, we measured the deformability properties for untreated and temperature-inactivated oocysts of the highly infective, human pathogenic C. parvum to assess whether deformability may be a marker of viability. Our results indicate that untreated and temperature-inactivated C. parvum oocysts had overlapping but significantly different deformability distributions.

Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0150438

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150438

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