Nanobiosensors based on individual olfactory receptors

In the SPOT-NOSED European project, nanoscale sensing elements bearing olfactory receptors and grafted onto functionalized gold substrates are used as odorant detectors to develop a new concept of nanobioelectronic nose, through sensitive impedancemetric measurement of single receptor conformational change upon ligand binding, with a better specificity and lower detection threshold than traditional physical sensors.