An in-vivo bioelectronic nose using bioengineered olfactory system of rat as sensitive elements towards explosive detection

Abstract

The biological olfactory system can quickly and accurately distinguish odors at trace level. The utilization of biological olfactory system as sensing elements greatly improves the sensitivity and accuracy of bioelectronic noses. In this study, an in-vivo bioelectronics nose was developed for explosive detection, in which bioengineered olfactory system of rat was used as sensitive elements and implantable microelectrode array (MEA) was employed as the transducer. An adeno-associated virus vector containing the gene of an olfactory receptor (OR)sensitive to explosives was constructed and used to generate bioengineered olfactory system of rats, which enables bioengineered rats to generate responsive signals to the target explosives. The responsive signals were collected and analyzed using a wireless MEA data acquisition system. The obtained results show this in-vivo bioelectronics nose is sensitive to different odorant molecules tested. For the next, we will test its capability of detecting explosive odorant molecules.