The Robotic Nose Knows

Researchers have been sniffing around for electronic olfactory capabilities for years and the Spot-Nosed project may finally be, well, spot on.

A project of the European Community for the implementation of the Fifth Framework Programme, Spot-Nosed is a single protein nanobiosensor grid array that's based on the electrical properties of single olfactory receptors (protein). The olfactory nanobiosensor array consists of an array of elementary nanobiotransducers, each of which will consist of a single olfactory receptor attached on a functionalised metal nanoelectrode.

Developed and tested by researchers in Spain, France, and Italy with funding from the European Commission’s FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) initiative of the IST programme, Spot-Nosed might eventually lead to electronic noses based on natural olfactory receptors that could be used in healthcare, agriculture, environmental protection, or security.

Here's how Spot-Nosed works: 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 detects 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," says project-coordinator Josep Samitier. 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 1000 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, project partners are planning to continue their research and develop the instrumentation and software tools necessary for an electronic nose to recognize 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).

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:04 AM  Permalink