Single-carbon-atomic-resolution Detection Of Odorant Molecules Using A Human Olfactory Receptor-based Bioelectronic Nose

摘要

Portable nanosensor systems for the rapid detection of specific odorants are crucial for anti-bioterrorism, disease diagnostics, and food safety. Since the first report of an 'electronic nose', there have been many efforts to develop artificial olfactory sensors based on arrays of semiconductor devices. However, the capability of the electronic nose is still, in many ways, inferior to that of the human olfactory system in terms of selectivity. In the smelling process of the human olfactory system, the initial step is the binding of specific odorants to the olfactory receptor proteins, which triggers signal transduction in a cell. The last decade has been marked by the development of a 'bioelectronic nose' with the olfactory receptor proteins as a sensing part. Various techniques, such as quartz-crystal microbalance, electrochemical impedance spectrometry, surface plasmon resonance, and light-addressable potentiometric sensors, have been used as transducer parts of the bioelectronic nose, while those techniques often suffer from bulky system size and limited sensitivity. On the other hand, although nanometer-scale sensors based on single-walled carbon nanotube (swCNT)-field effect transistors (FETs) have been utilized for highly- sensitive chemical sensing, the low selectivity of such sensors has been a major problem holding back their practical applications.