Researchers at Ohio State University Are Building a Dust Library
Posted on October 6, 2011
Just hearing about this library may make people with allergies feel the urge to sneeze. Researchers at Ohio State University are building a dust library. The researchers recently isolated 63 unique dust particles from their laboratory. This is just the start. The researchers want to study many dust particles.
Most dust is natural in origin, says James Coe, professor of chemistry at Ohio State University. The 63 particles they identified were mainly irregular blobs containing bits of many different ingredients.
The chemists were testing a new kind of sensor when dust got stuck inside it. This made the chemists discover that they would be able to measure the composition of single dust particles. The above image shows a close up of a single dust paticle and the image below shows a sample of dust particles on the sensor surface.
In a recent issue of The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, the researchers explain how the dust library could aid the study respiratory diseases caused by airborne particles.
The most common ingredient of the dust particles was organic matter, Coe said. "Organic" indicates some kind of plant or animal material. The researchers can't yet say precisely what kinds of organic matter they found. They are about to do an in-depth analysis to find out.
Quartz was the second-most common ingredient. Both quartz and organic matter were found in more than half of the dust particles the researchers classified. Man-made chemicals from air pollution, fertilizers, and construction materials were also present in small amounts.
Forty of the particles (63 percent) contained organic material. The most common mineral was quartz, which was present in 34 (54 percent) of the particles, followed by carbonates (17 particles, or 27 percent), and gypsum (14 particles, or 22 percent).
The patented sensor that Coe's team was testing - a type of metal mesh that transmits infrared light through materials caught in the holes - is ideal for picking up minute details in the composition of single dust grains.
Coe says, "We can separate particles by size to isolate the ones that are small enough to get into people's lungs, and look at them in detail."