Quantitative assessment of automated purification and concentration of E. coli bacteria.

Automated methods for rapidly purifying and concentrating bacteria from environmental interferents are needed in next-generation applications for anything from water purification to biological weapons detection. Though previous work has been performed by other researchers in this area, there is still a need to create an automated system that can both purify and concentrate target pathogens in a timely manner with readily available and replaceable components that could be easily integrated with a detection mechanism. Thus, the objective of this work was to design, build, and demonstrate the effectiveness of an automated system, the Automated Dual-filter method for Applied Recovery, or aDARE.