EVAPORATION OF LEVITATED BACTERIA-LADEN DROPLETS AT DIFFERENT STAGES AND RELATIVE HUMIDITY
ORAL
Abstract
A droplet is the main component of aerosols responsible for transmitting many respiratory diseases. Therefore, understanding the desiccation dynamics of the droplet in conjunction with infection studies is a comprehensive research study. Such studies are rarely attempted due to the complexity of experimenting with bacteria/viruses. Our study experimentally compared the levitated samples at two different relative humidity conditions and three stages of diameter-based evaporation. Our study demonstrates the role of the differential relative humidity-based precipitation in conferring virulence to infectious pathogens. For the same initial diameter of the droplet, the average mass evaporation rate for the droplet at low RH is one to two orders higher than the droplet at high RH conditions. Therefore, more evaporative stress is experienced by the bacteria in the low RH case. The bacterial survival is higher in the high RH case than in the low RH case. Also, the bacteria survive more at the early stage of the diameter-based evaporation than the final precipitate stage for both RH conditions. Therefore, the high RH samples exhibited increased virulence properties compared to the low RH samples.
*Prime Minister’s Research Fellows (PMRF) fellowship scheme MHRD, Government of IndiaPratt & Whitney Chair Professorship and SERB-SUPRA (Scientific and Useful Profound Research Advancement) project number SERB/F/10572/2021-2022CSIR- SPM fellowship, Government of IndiaScience and Engineering Research Board (SERB)DAE SRC fellowship (DAE00195) and DBT-IIScInfrastructure support from ICMR (Centre for Advanced Study in Molecular Medicine), DST(FIST), and UGC (special assistance) is highly acknowledged along with ASTRA- Chairfellowship, TATA Innovation grant, and DBT-IOE partnership grant.The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, publication decisions, or manuscript preparation.
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Publication:We are submitting a manuscript from this work soon to a peer-reviewed journal Evaporation and pathogenesis of levitated bacteria-laden surrogate respiratory fluid droplets: At different relative humidity and evaporation stages Amey Nitin Agharkar1# Dipasree Hajra2#, Kush Kumar Dewangan3, Dipshikha Chakravortty2,4 and Saptarshi Basu1,3*
