Rosa Biotech gets biosensors on the nose

Recommendable! Do you smell something? :-)

"The human nose can distinguish at least a trillion different odours, thanks to around 400 types of scent receptors. ... Most biosensors, however, can only bind a single analyte, limiting their ability to detect different odours. Rosa Biotech ... has developed biosensing technology that mimics mammals’ olfactory system to work more like an electronic nose. The sensors bind to a huge range of analytes and, as such, detect various combinations of molecules and odours.
The technology is based on α-helix barrels engineered from peptides. The self-assembling, hyperstable molecules can be designed in an almost infinite number of variants, each of which displays different binding affinities. ... ‘Based on the number of α-helices you design, by changing the amino acids in the barrel, it changes the hindrances, charge profile and its affinity for a range of different molecules.’
Rosa engineers its sensors by combining the peptide barrels with fluorescent, hydrophobic dyes. ... Because the dyes fluoresce inside the hydrophobic environment of the barrel, but not on the outside, it produces a fluorescence profile for each barrel or analyte. ... Rosa can tweak the peptide barrels to be more sensitive to specific applications and different sets of molecules."

Rosa Biotech gets biosensors on the nose | Business | Chemistry World Protein barrel arrays mimic mammals’ olfactory system to distinguish many different molecules

Neuromorphic Chips Mimic Fine Noses

Good news! Below are two articles describing what appears to be two different, but promising efforts using neuromorphic chips! "pav[ing] the way for neuromorphic systems that can diagnose diseases, detect weapons and explosives, find narcotics, and spot signs of smoke and carbon monoxide. ... This work is a prime example of contemporary research at the crossroads of neuroscience and artificial intelligence"

"Intel’s 14-nanometer Loihi chip has a 60-millimeter die size and contains over 2 billion transistors, 130,000 artificial neurons, and 130 million synapses, as well as three managing Lakemont cores for orchestration."

"... neuromorphic AI’s keen sense of smell in muddled samples. The neuromorphic AI simply added acetone to its scent-recognition repertoire, but the standard AI couldn’t learn acetone without forgetting the smell of toluene. These kinds of memory lapses [catastrophic forgetting] are a major limitation of current AI. Continual learning seems to work well for the neuromorphic system when there are few scents involved ... Another perk of the neuromorphic setup is that the AI can keep learning new smells after its original training if new neurons are added to the network, similar to the way that new cells continually form in the brain."

Intel trains neuromorphic chip to detect 10 different odors | VentureBeat: In a newly published paper, researchers at Intel and Cornell University demonstrate that Intel's neuromorphic chip can be taught to identify various odors.

An AI that mimics how mammals smell recognizes scents better than other AI This kind of algorithm could be used in testing air quality or diagnosing medical conditions