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The olfactory system plays an important role in recognizing environmental conditions. Conventional electronic noses have been developed; however, they have limitations in sensitivity and specificity. On the contrary, the biological olfactory system has extremely high selectivity and sensitivity. Since olfactory receptor genes were identified and cloned, various researches on olfactory systems have been carried out, and the interest in olfaction research has been increasing due to its potential industrial applications. In the smelling process, the binding of
specific odorants to the olfactory receptor proteins is the initiation step in odor recognition and triggers signal transduction in a cell. Functional expression of the olfactory receptors on the surface of culturable cells is very useful for application to an olfactory sensor. In this presentation, I am going to report a successful demonstration of human olfactory receptor-functionalized carbon nanotube- and conducting polymer nanotube-based FET sensors. We achieved highly-specific detection of odorant molecules down to femtomolar range sensitivity.
The selectivity of this device is also extremely high. This device responds to the femtomolar concentrations of amylbutyrate; however, it does not produce any response to the related esters such as butyland hexyl butyrates that differ from the target compound by a single carbon atom each.