Scanning electron micrograph of the head of Drosophila melanogaster showing the compound eyes and olfactory organs.
Sniffing a better future with Cybernose
Our project aim is to co-opt the olfactory receptors of insects and worms to engineer a robust cybernose. If successful, the project will create a quality-monitoring technology with the potential to transform many aspects of the food supply chain.
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17 August 2010 | Updated 3 May 2012
Overview
Cybernose – developing olfactory biosensor technology
Satisfying the increasing consumer concern and demand relating to food quality and safety requires the implementation of whole-of-chain quality management.
Food Futures Flagship is developing new ways to quantify the volatile organic compounds that give rise to much of the flavour and aroma of food and beverages.
These compounds are important quality determinants in their own right and may also be used as proxies for a range of non-volatile chemical changes in food.
The chemosenses of animals, their senses of smell and taste, outperform current instrumentation in many respects, including sensitivity and portability.
Examples include dogs that can be trained to detect bladder cancer using their sense of smell and bees that can detect explosive chemicals.
Additional applications for the technology are also currently being explored in the areas of defence security and health
Nature and technology
Our project aim is to co-opt the olfactory receptors of insects and worms to engineer a robust Cybernose, which can reproducibly fingerprint olfactory patterns.
The project aims to create a quality-monitoring technology with the potential to transform many aspects of the food supply chain.
An initial task is to establish the specificity of odorant receptors (ORs) for odorants of interest to the food and beverage industries using invertebrates with fully sequenced genomes as the source material.
Food Futures Flagship is collaborating with leading researchers at Australian universities and CSIRO’s sister organisations overseas to develop and exploit ways of expressing ORs in cellular and cell-free systems.
Odorant receptors are unusual, in that until very recently, it has been impossible to express them functionally, except in olfactory neurons.
The project aims to create a quality-monitoring technology with the potential to transform many aspects of the food supply chain.
Recent discoveries have identified factors that interact with ORs and support their functional expression in vivo, that is in a real life situation.
To incorporate ORs as the front end of a Cybernose, research scientists need to couple the activation of these receptors to an electrical signal.
In vivo, this process is achieved with high sensitivity and high gain, when ions flow across the membrane of a sensory nerve cell.
However, intact cellular membranes are notoriously fragile and problematic to use in instruments. CSIRO researchers are exploring a range of physicochemical and biochemical options to solve this key technical challenge.
Industry applications
There is an unmet market need for rapid, on-site, highly sensitive, specific and quantitative measurement of odorants and for pattern-matching of complex odours in many potential application areas, including:
New applications in defence
CSIRO has been successful in gaining funding for an innovative proposal through the Department of Defence. The Food Futures Flagship, through CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences and Materials Science and Engineering, will be developing a non-contact instrument to detect and classify explosives.
The Food Futures Flagship has been conducting research into the microscopic sensors in insects and nematode worms that detect smells. This has led to identification of more than 200 different biosensor genes that react to different smells.
This new research program will lead to the construction of a prototype instrument that can perform non-contact chemical detection and classification of explosives using signature chemical vapours.
Sniffer dogs, while excellent at detection of explosives in the field, cannot distinguish between different types of explosives. This device will be as sensitive as a dog’s nose and will give operators clear advice on the nature of any explosives detected.
This prototype instrument will also be a forerunner for applications in the food, beverage and health arenas.
Find out more about biosensor research in the SOLVE article: Judging the Wine in the Grape.
- Cybernose is a registered trademark of CSIRO.
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