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Researchers Close to Developing Artificial Noses
The breakthrough may also be helpful in discerning how the senses of smell can recognize a seemingly infinite range of odours, say the researchers.
"Smell is perhaps one of the oldest and most primitive senses, but nobody really understands how it works. It still remains a tantalizing enigma," said Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering and senior author of a paper on the work appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
He and his colleagues believe that artificial noses can provide an alternative to drug- and explosive-sniffing dogs, apart from having numerous medical applications.
The researchers have already secured funding from DARPA for its RealNose project.
To date, scientists have struggled to understand the molecular basis of smell due to the difficulty in working with the proteins that detect odors, known as olfactory receptors.
"The main barrier to studying smell is that we haven't been able to make enough receptors and purify them to homogeneity. Now, it's finally available as a raw material for people to utilize, and should enable many new studies into smell research," said Brian Cook, who just defended his MIT PhD thesis based on this work.
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