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Chronic intestinal Mycobacteria infection: discrimination via VOC analysis in exhaled breath and headspace of feces using differential ion mobility spectrometry*

Roman Purkhart1,2, Heike Köhler1, Elisabeth Liebler-Tenorio1, Michaela Meyer1, Gunther Becher3, Angela Kikowatz4 and Petra Reinhold1,5

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Differential ion mobility spectrometry (DMS) is a method to detect volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the ppt range. This study assessed whether VOC analysis using DMS could discriminate subjects with an experimentally induced chronic intestinal infection caused by Mycobacteria from non-infected controls. The animal model consisted of two groups of goats orally infected with two different doses of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) and one group of non-infected healthy controls (each group: n = 6). Using DMS, exhaled breath and headspace of feces were analyzed on-line on an individual basis 9 months after inoculation of MAP. Data analysis included peak detection, cluster analysis, selection of discriminating VOC features (Mann–Whitney U test), and classification using a support-vector-machine. Taking the background of ambient air conditions into account, VOC analysis of exhaled breath as well as of feces revealed significant differences between chronically infected animals and non-infected controls. In both specimens, increasing as well as decreasing VOC features could be attributed to infection. Discrimination between infected and non-infected animals was sharper analyzing exhaled breath compared to headspace of feces. In exhaled breath, at least two VOC features were found to increase in a dose-dependent manner with increasing doses of MAP inoculated. Results of this study provide strong evidence that DMS analysis of exhaled breath has the potential to become a valuable tool for non-invasive assessment of VOC specifically related to certain diseases or infections.


Footnote
*  Data were partly presented at the German–Austrian Workshop on Breath Gas Analysis, Greifswald (Germany), June 07–09, 2010 and at the 20th Annual Congress of the European Respiratory Society, Barcelona (Spain), September 18–22, 2010.
PACS

87.80.-y Biophysical techniques (research methods)

87.15.M- Spectra of biomolecules

82.80.Ms Mass spectrometry (including SIMS, multiphoton ionization and resonance ionization mass spectrometry, MALDI)

87.19.U- Hemodynamics

47.63.Ec Pulmonary fluid mechanics

87.15.N- Properties of solutions of macromolecules

Subjects

Fluid dynamics

Instrumentation and measurement

Medical physics

Biological physics

Chemical physics and physical chemistry

Dates

Issue 2 (June 2011)

Received 25 October 2010, accepted for publication 30 March 2011

Published 21 April 2011



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