Oscillator

Biomaterials Insight

There’s a neat set of articles in this week’s issue of Nature on biomaterials. From the editorial:

Biomaterials research has come of age. Since antiquity, humans have been taking whatever substances are at hand — natural materials, glass, metals or polymers — and using them to replace body parts that have been damaged by disease or injury. But it is only recently, with the advent of molecular biology, that the field has become interdisciplinary, enabling materials scientists to design materials that impart a specific biological function. The field of biomaterials is also broadening as we improve our understanding of how the physical sciences can help to explain biology and indeed of how biological principles, mechanisms and molecules can be applied in the design of materials for non-biological applications.

The articles (which unfortunately require subscription but I can send them along to individuals who don’t have access) are interesting reviews on different aspects of biomaterials research—

• Inspiration and application in the evolution of biomaterials
• Designing materials to direct stem-cell fate
• Biomaterial systems for mechanosensing and actuation
• Materials engineering for immunomodulation
• Drivers of biodiagnostic development

There’s a lot of really fascinating stuff going on in the field of biologically inspired engineering, notably at Harvard’s Wyss Institute. It’s an excellent counterpoint and partner to synthetic biology and something I’m increasingly interested in.

Electronic Noses

Biomimetic electronic noses are designed to mimic the olfactory system of mammals, with receptors that respond to certain chemicals, sending an electronic signal to a computer that can integrate the responses in order to identify the odorant. These systems are useful in industrial food preparation, where contamination by microorganisms must be detected as soon as possible. A fascinating new paper attempts to improve these electronic noses my linking the combinations of receptor signals to common smell metaphors used by real humans, like “This flavour is sweet”.

From the paper’s abstract:

Smell provides important information about the quality of food and drink. Most well-known for their expertise in wine tasting, sommeliers sniff out the aroma of wine and describe them using beautiful metaphors. In contrast, electronic noses, devices that mimic our olfactory recognition system, also detect smells using their sensors but describe them using electronic signals. These devices have been used to judge the freshness of food or detect the presence of pathogenic microorganisms. However, unlike information from gas chromatography, it is difficult to compare odour information collected by these devices because they are made for smelling specific smells and their data are relative intensities. Here, we demonstrate the use of an absolute-value description method using known smell metaphors, and early detection of yeast using the method. This technique may help distinguishing microbial-contamination of food products earlier, or improvement of the food-product qualities.

This idea is so interesting; combining in a biomimetic system not only the molecular components of chemical sensing in the nose, but also the integrative aspects of smell and taste and flavor that the brain does. Will there be an electronic sommelier someday?

BioMorph

Vague Terrain 14: BioMorph

Can an art project be synthetic biology? What “counts” as science vs. art?