Scientists claim breakthrough in artificial nose technology

by Rich Bowden - Sep 30 2008, 21:05

U.S. scientists have taken the next step in creating an artificial nose by discovering a method to mass-produce smell receptors. $Img: Dog\'s Nose. Credit: bazusa/flickr.$

Img: Dog\'s Nose. Credit: bazusa/flickr.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will publish research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which will show how the team has unlocked the mystery of how smell is able to detect a seemingly infinite range of odours."Smell is perhaps one of the oldest and most primitive senses, but nobody really understands how it works," said Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering and senior author of the paper. "It still remains a tantalizing enigma."A statement released by MIT said artificial noses could have important medical applications and could, in the future, replace sniffer dogs used for locating drugs and explosives. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense agency responsible for the development of new technology for the U.S. military, has recently approved funding for the team's MIT (microfluidic-integrated transduction) RealNose project.Previous studies into the remarkable sense of smell had been stymied by the difficulties in working with olfactory receptors, explained team member Brian Cook."The main barrier to studying smell is that we haven't been able to make enough receptors and purify them to homogeneity. Now, it's finally available as a raw material for people to utilize, and should enable many new studies into smell research," he said.The team spent several years isolating and purifying the proteins "by performing each step in a hydrophobic detergent solution, which allows the proteins to maintain their structure and function," outlined the university.The research is funded by ROHM Corporation (Japan), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (Sweden), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Scientists claim breakthrough in artificial nose technology

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