Odor biosensor system based on image lock-in measurement for odorant discrimination

Abstract

There has been so far few odor sensors with an array of the biosensor elements. However, an odor sensor constructed in this fashion is expected to have high performance in terms of the ability to discriminate between odorants. In this study, a parallel lock-in measurement circuit was developed to acquire the fluorescent image of the cells even under an ambient light. Since that circuit can extract only the responses of the cells from the fluorescent image, its output represents a specific pattern corresponding to the odorant. Therefore, principal component analysis was applied to that output in order to confirm the availability of the odorant discrimination by using a fluorescent image. It was found that the output pattern from the developed circuit included information enough to discriminate between at least two types of odorants.