UC Davis

Portable methods for measurement and quantification of biological analytes have tremendous promise to advance non-invasive personal health monitoring devices. Exhaled breath metabolomics shares this promise and has been gaining popularity as a non-invasive technique amenable to a vast range of medical uses. Novel sampling technologies, rapid portable breath chemical analysis platforms, and miniaturized manufacturing methods have the potential to be scaled up for wide use in basic medical practice. This work presents design and implementation for collection and chemical analysis of human exhaled breath condensate. Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) samples were collected with a novel miniaturized sampler. Breath metabolite abundances were compared in healthy control subjects and asthmatic subjects. This work also investigates the relationship between breath aerosol size and EBC metabolomic content. Additionally, this work contributes to the fundamental performance of electrospray with a microfluidic chip, a technique used for liquid biochemical detection in analytical chemistry.