Odor discrimination using cell-based odor biosensor system with fluorescent image processing

Abstract

Various types of odor sensor systems have been developed for the discrimination and quantification of odorants. Although the use of biological components may improve sensitivity, a few studies have reported on the use of an array of biological elements for odor discrimination. In this paper, odorants were discriminated using an odor biosensor system with cells expressing different types of olfactory receptors. A cell's response to an odorant was acquired as a fluorescent image followed by an image processing technique based on circle Hough transform. The principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis demonstrated the ability to discriminate between two odorants at different concentrations. The result suggests that the combination of a biosensor and image processing technique has the potential to discriminate between different odorants even if the cells are placed at random.