Sydney, July 30 (Inditop.com) Electronic noses developed by researchers are nowhere as sensitive as natural noses of the common house fly known as Drosophila, according to the latest research.
Scientists found this after developing a system to compare the performance of an e-nose against the much superior Drosophila fly nose.
The breakthrough was achieved by Food Futures Flagship (3F) of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia.
“Although e-noses already have many uses – such as detecting spoilage in the food industry and monitoring air quality, they are not as discriminating as biological noses,” said 3F’s Stephen Trowell, who led the study.
“Our efforts to improve e-noses recently received a boost following our development of a new system which enables us to compare technical sensors with biological sensors,” Trowell added.
“We looked at how the most common type of e-nose sensors – metal oxide or ‘MOx’ receptors – sample the air around them. This is a critical factor in the performance of all noses. We then compared it with the performance of odorant receptors from the common house fly, Drosophila.”
“We already know that fly receptors, unlike most other bio-receptors, are not very specific. Even so, it really surprised us how much narrower the responses of the MOx sensors were than the biological ones,” said Trowell.
“We also found that the fly bio-receptors outperformed the MOx sensors in their levels of independence. The fly seems to make a range of broadly tuned receptors that are independent of each other and human engineers haven’t yet worked out how to do this,” he added.
These results were published in the Wednesday edition of PLoS ONE.
