European investigators have designed a novel olfactory bioelectronic sensor with potential clinical applications, reports EU’s Information Society Technologies (IST):
“The potential uses of smell technology are endless,” notes Josep Samitier, the coordinator of the SPOT-NOSED project that developed nanobiosensors to mimic the way human and animal noses respond to different odours.
This new nose biosensor is unusual in how it’s made. By placing a layer of proteins that constitute the olfactory receptors in animal noses on a microelectrode and measuring the reaction when the proteins come into contact with different odorants, the system is capable of detecting odorants at concentrations that would be imperceptible to humans.
“Our tests showed that the nanobiosensors will react to a few molecules of odorant with a very high degree of accuracy. Some of the results of the trials surpassed even our expectations,” Samitier says. These tiny bioelectronic sensors, he says, represent a ‘major leap forward’ in smell technology and a clear example of a biomimetic devices obtained by converging Nano-Bio-Info technologies.
Several hundred different proteins, which the SPOT-NOSED researchers genetically copied from rats and grew in yeast, would be needed for an electronic nose to detect almost any smell because different proteins react to different odorants and it is the resultant combination of reactions that identifies a certain smell. Nanotechnology makes such an electronic nose feasible, the coordinator notes, even though the human nose uses 1,000 different proteins to allow the brain to recognise 10,000 different smells.
While the SPOT-NOSED project focused on replicating the physical reaction that takes place in animal noses, the project partners are now planning to continue their research and develop the instrumentation and software tools necessary for an electronic nose to recognise smells – the role played by the brain in the olfactory system. In this sense, new high accuracy electronic instrumentation capable of performing electrical measurements at the nanoscale level has been developed and adapted to an atomic force microscope with atofarad precision (10-15).
This, Samitier says, could lead to medical applications to diagnose organ failure, bacterial infections or diseases such as cancer being made commercially available within a few years, as well as devices that would have a major impact on other sectors.
The IST press release…
The SPOT-NOSED project page…
Flashbacks: Chemical Sensors, Neural Network for Human Breath Analysis; The Breathmeter™; Can Dogs Smell CA?; Detecting Infection With E-nose; The Breathscanner 1.0