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Elucidation of olfactory mechanism and development of olfactory sensor

【LIFE SCIENCE】 Fukutani Unit

  • Overview

    Animals obtain various information from the smell in the environment. Just as police dogs in criminal investigations and drug detection dogs at airports, the olfaction has extremely high sensitivity and high discrimination. No artificial odor detection device has achieved such performance. The olfactory sensory neuron cells on the epithelium in the nasal cavity express membrane proteins called olfactory receptors. There are several hundred olfactory receptors per species, and their response to odor differs from one another. We are conducting research to elucidate the odor response mechanism of olfactory receptors and develop an odor sensor using olfactory receptors. The olfactory receptors are membrane proteins and is extremely difficult to study. We are developing new technologies to study for the function of olfactory receptor. In addition, by analyzing the response patterns of multiple olfactory receptors when exposed to odor molecules from the vapor phase, we have succeeded in discrimination of odor molecules that are very close in chemical structure. Recently, our group succeeded the detection of odor molecules using the graphene-FET devices with olfactory receptors. These technologies are expected to be applied to the development of an odor sensor that mimics the sense of smell.

Team Head

International Researcher(s)

Members

Kenzo Maehashi (Institute of Engineering / Professor)
Takashi Ikuta (Institute of Engineering / Assistant Professor)

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