South Korean scientists have developed a
biomimetic detector based on receptors in the canine olfactory system to detect
whether food is going bad.
Dogs
have a highly sensitive olfactory system, and their superior smell sensitivity
has made our canine friends an integral part of search and rescue operations
and security patrol teams.
But can
their superior olfactory sensitivity be used in our daily life to test if the
foods we are about to consume have gone bad? Scientists from South Korea seem
to think so.
In a
paper published in the journal Analyst, a team led by Professor
Seunghun Hong from Seoul National University has developed a biomimetic
detector based on receptors in the canine olfactory system to detect a chemical
that indicates whether food is spoiled.
When
foods are going bad, oxidized chemicals such as hexanal are produced and
released.
Conventional
methods for food safety evaluation requires complicated sample processing in
large facilities, and expensive and slow process to determine food quality.
Using
nanovesicles and carbon nanotubes on a chip, the team detected hexanal
production in real time, suggesting the potential to give fast, on-site assessment
of food quality.
Their
system is based on measuring the change in conductance caused by calcium influx
when the molecules bind to the receptor, similar to cellular signaling in
vivo. The sensor detected hexanal in spoilt milk samples down to one femtomolar
(1 fM) concentrations.
Moreover,
the team also showed that the sensor can discriminate against binding to other
similar molecules at the single carbon atomic resolution, indicating high
specificity to hexanal.
Although
other olfactory cell-based sensors have been designed before, this is the first
time an actual biological signaling pathway has been mimicked. The rotting milk
also did not require prior preprocessing before detection.
The
article can be found at: Park J et al. (2012) Bioelectronic
sensor based on canine olfactory nanovesicle-carbon nanotube hybrid structures
for the fast assessment of food quality.
Sophia
Li
AsianScientist
Source: RSC
Publishing; Photo: factoryjoe.com.
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