Portable Pollen Analyzer

We propose to leverage the expertise of Applied Nanotech, Inc. (ANI) in building highly sensitive, selective, portable and versatile GC/DMS instruments, to create a system to uniquely identify pollen species in complex mixtures based on their VOC profile. This project will determine which VOCs shall be collected and how many pollen grains are needed in order to increase the confidence of accurately identifying a spatial and temporal origin of the pollen. Over the two year Phase II program, we will collect over 100 pollen species with different spatial and temporal origin and create a user updatable pollen database. We will also show that a GC/DMS instrument consisting of a flash thermolysis (FT) sampling unit coupled with a gas chromatograph (GC) and a differential mobility spectrometer (DMS, a specific configuration of ion mobility spectrometer), can provide the needed selectivity and sensitivity in a small, robust and relatively inexpensive package.