Highly sensitive and selective odorant sensor using living cells expressing insect olfactory receptors

TLDR

The study develops a highly sensitive, selective odorant sensor that uses Xenopus laevis oocytes in a portable fluidic device. The sensor is built by semiautomatically loading oocytes into a fluidic chip, enabling stable and reproducible odorant detection. The sensor achieves parts‑per‑billion sensitivity, discriminates closely related odorants, operates reliably on multiple targets, integrates with robotics without noise suppression, and is compact enough for portable environmental monitoring.

Abstract

This paper describes a highly sensitive and selective chemical sensor using living cells ( Xenopus laevis oocytes) within a portable fluidic device. We constructed an odorant sensor whose sensitivity is a few parts per billion in solution and can simultaneously distinguish different types of chemicals that have only a slight difference in double bond isomerism or functional group such as ─OH, ─CHO and ─C(═O)─. We developed a semiautomatic method to install cells to the fluidic device and achieved stable and reproducible odorant sensing. In addition, we found that the sensor worked for multiple-target chemicals and can be integrated with a robotic system without any noise reduction systems. Our developed sensor is compact and easy to replace in the system. We believe that the sensor can potentially be incorporated into a portable system for monitoring environmental and physical conditions.