Abstract
A bioelectronic nose device based on micelle-stabilized olfactory receptors is developed for the selective discrimination of a butter flavor substance in commercial fermented alcoholic beverages. In this work, we have successfully overexpressed ODR-10, a type of olfactory receptor, from Caenorhabditis elegans using a bacterial expression system at a low cost and high productivity. The highly-purified ODR-10 was stabilized in micelle structures, and it was immobilized on a carbon nanotube field-effect transistor to build a bioelectronic nose for the detection of diacetyl, a butter flavor substance, via the specific interaction between diacetyl and ODR-10. The bioelectronic nose device can sensitively detect diacetyl down to 10 fM, and selectively discriminate it from other substances. In addition, this sensor could directly evaluate diacetyl levels in a variety of real fermented alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, and makgeolli (fermented Korean wine), while the sensor did not respond to soju (Korean style liquor without diacetyl). In this respect, our sensor should be a powerful tool for versatile food industrial applications such as the quality control of alcoholic beverages and foods.
Highlights
On the other hand, several researchers have attempted to develop a sensor system utilizing biomaterials as probes for the detection of food flavor substances[16,17]
The carbon nanotube (CNT) channel region was coated with 1-pyrenebutanoic acid succinimidyl ester (PSE) as a non-covalent linker[17]
Sample solutions including diacetyl with different concentrations were applied to a bioelectronic nose device while monitoring the conductance change of the CNT channels in the device
Summary
Several researchers have attempted to develop a sensor system utilizing biomaterials as probes for the detection of food flavor substances[16,17]. Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) devices have been combined with extracted ODR-10 proteins to build a bioelectronic nose device for the detection of food flavor substances[18]. Such ODR-10 protein-based probes for sensor systems may be unstable in some real-food environments such as alcoholic beverages. GPCRs were packed tightly in amphiphilic-phospholipids so that they can form a stable structure in aqueous environments and mimic the native structure of the GPCRs in a cell Such micelle-stabilized GPCRs have been utilized to build stable biosensor devices based on various sensor transducers[21,22]. Since our method allows one to quantitatively evaluate the butter flavor substance in real-samples with a rather simple manner compared with previous methods such as fluorescence assays and HPLC9,12, it can be a powerful tool for various basic research and industrial applications such as the screening of alcoholic beverages and foods
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