Team:NEU-China/Design
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Design
How does iSmeller work?
Once a specific odor binds to the olfactory receptor on the cell membrane, it leads to a series of signaling rally and consequently generates a flux of cAMP (cyclic AMP) which could be detected by a cAMP-activated reporter gene system. Complete olfactory receptor signaling exists primarily in the olfactory epithelia cells which are not easily cultured and amplified to generate the ex vivo biosensor, and the mixed expression of different endogenous olfactory receptors in these cells may generate high background or confounding noises to detect a specific odor from the engineering point of view. Eukaryotic HEK293 cells could overcome these pitfalls and allows us to introduce highly specific olfactory receptor signaling within those easily engineered cells. Moreover, such eukaryotic cell-based biosensor can better mimic the powerful mammalian nose by the combinatorial olfactory receptor design, compared to the prokaryote or cell-free based biosensor systems.
