What is it about?
Exposure to airborne allergen, such as mouse allergen, can contribute to development of respiratory diseases. Common methods rely on determining how much grams of mouse allergen is present, not necessarily on how much mouse allergen particles are airborne within a given space. This study combined a blotting technique, with similarities to Western blot, with microscopy to determine the concentration of particles after a pre-determine sampling time.
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Why is it important?
The findings of this study are important because it provided evidence to support that smaller particles carrying mouse allergen may not be detected my conventional methods that assess the grams of mouse allergen. Evaluating how much airborne allergen particles rather than how much grams, could provide a better measure of respiratory health risk due to mouse allergen exposure.
Perspectives
This study was another great opportunity to employ an innovative technique can be of great use in public health studies in detecting airborne allergens particles. This was also a great opportunity to experience the skilled mentoring of Dr. Patrick Breysse and Dr. Elizabeth Matsui while I was a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Patrick Breysse was my postdoctoral co-mentor at Johns Hopkins University; he is now the director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, and Dr. Matsui is not the director of Population Health at the Dell School of Medicine at the University of Texas-Austin.
Dr Felix Rivera-Mariani
Larkin University College of Biomedical Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Performance of the halogen immunoassay to assess airborne mouse allergen-containing particles in a laboratory animal facility, Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology, July 2012, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/jes.2012.76.
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