'Artificial Nose' Progress: Engineers Mass-produce Smell Receptors

"Smell is perhaps one of the oldest and most primitive senses, but nobody really understands how it works. It still remains a tantalizing enigma,"

Artificial noses could one day replace drug- and explosive-sniffing dogs, and could have numerous medical applications, according to Zhang and his colleagues. DARPA recently approved funding for the team's MIT (microfluidic-integrated transduction) RealNose project.

Until now, efforts to understand the molecular basis of smell have been stymied by the difficulty in working with the proteins that detect odors, known as olfactory receptors.

Now, it's finally available as a raw material for people to utilize, and should enable many new studies into smell research

Humans have a vast olfactory system that includes close to 400 functional genes, more than are dedicated to any other function. Animals such as dogs and mice have around 1,000 functional olfactory receptor genes