Posted by ketyung
on Jan/12/2009
at 8:25 am
Celebrities who have been unsatisfied with their nose and had a couple of plastic surgeries to get the perfect nose might face the risk of “losing their nose”. But no worry, nanotechnology is here to help build virtual nose that will be as good as the human nose that could even sniff drugs out.
A team of Korean scientists led by Dr. Seunghun Hong at the Hybrid Nano-Device & Nano-Assembly Lab at Seoul National University, is now on track to building a functional artificial nose based on carbon nanotubes, which has been tested capable of detecting the presence of ‘fruit flavor’ odorant molecules at single-carbon-atomic resolution.
The technology may not necessarily be used to build virtual human nose for patients that have nose problem. It can be applied to building devices with olfactory sense, which can then be used at food industry to smell out rotten food.
“We have fabricated carbon nanotube-based field effect transistors (FETs), which can detect electrical potential changes around them, and then, for the first time, we successfully coated these FETs with cell membranes containing olfactory receptors which specifically bind to ‘fruit flavor’ odorant molecules,” Seunghun Hong tells Nanowerk.
Hong, an associate professor of physics at the Hybrid Nano-Device & Nano-Assembly Lab at Seoul National University, and his group, together with collaborators from Tai Hyun Park’s group at the university’s Institute of Bioengineering, have developed a strategy that overcomes the poor selectivity problem that characterized previous chemical sensors. They accomplished this by combining human olfactory receptors as a sensing element, while single-walled CNT-FETs enabled the high sensitivity of the sensors.
The team first tried to combine CNT-FETs with entire human olfactory cells but found it extremely difficult to grow these cells on FETs. When they decided instead to coat their nanotubes only with cell membranes that contained receptor proteins they got successful results.
via [medgadget]
Nanotechnology,virtual nose
Technorati Tags: Nanotechnology, virtual nose
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