Development of an optoelectronic nose based on surface plasmon resonance imaging with peptide and hairpin DNA for sensing volatile organic compounds

Abstract

Nowadays, the analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is very important in various domains. In the last decades, electronic noses have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional analytical methods. Nevertheless, their wide use is still limited by their performances such as low selectivity. Herein, we developed an optoelectronic nose using virtually screened peptides and hairpin DNA (hpDNA) with improved selectivity as sensing materials and surface plasmon resonance imaging (SPRi) as the detection system. Thanks to the complementarity of their binding properties towards target VOCs, the obtained optoelectronic nose has very good selectivity, being able to discriminate not only between VOCs of different chemical families, but also VOCs of the same family with only 1-carbon difference. The combination of these sensing materials with SPRi is relevant for the development of optoelectronic nose with large sensor arrays and improved performances.