On-line monitoring and identification of bioaerosols.

Fast analysis of bioaerosols in clean room environments is necessary in order to prevent contamination of pharmaceutical products, minimize machine downtimes, or both. The detection and identification of microbes will be carried out in several steps: After impaction of the aerosol on a surface, the particles are presorted with glancing light illumination and fluorescence imaging in order to distinguish between abiotic and biotic particles. Since only the biotic particles are of interest, the analysis time can be minimized due to reduction of the data set. The biotic particles are then analyzed further with Raman spectroscopy and identified with a support vector machine.