Jointly Developed with Professor Park Taehyun's Team at Ewha Womans University
Seoul National University announced on the 25th that the research teams led by Professor Oh Junhak of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Professor Park Taehyun of the Department of Food and Nutrition at Ewha Womans University have jointly developed a next-generation artificial olfactory system.
Professor Oh Jun-hak, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Seoul National University [Photo by Seoul National University]
The artificial olfactory system mimics the human sense of smell to detect and analyze odors. It features rapid detection speed and high accuracy, enabling real-time monitoring of compound types and concentrations. Additionally, it can be used in environments that are difficult for humans to access, making it recognized as an important technology that opens new application fields.
The joint research team created three types of human olfactory receptors as nanodiscs and integrated them into a neuromorphic device. The developed system not only shows high sensitivity to various odor substances but also, based on the neuromorphic device, recognizes and learns odor information patterns and can infer unknown odors.
The core of this research lies in the ability to distinguish various odor substances at the molecular chain length level through artificial neural network learning and to accurately differentiate their mixtures with high precision.
Professor Park stated, "The neuromorphic device, which mimics the human brain, learns and infers the unique pattern information of odor substances created by the olfactory receptor array, making it very similar to the human sense of smell," and added, "We expect this research outcome to greatly contribute to the on-device implementation of olfaction."
Meanwhile, this research was conducted with support from the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea through the Mid-career Researcher Support Program, Basic Research Laboratory Support Program, Nanomaterial Technology Development Program, the Toray Science Promotion Foundation, and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. The research results were published in the prestigious international journal Science Advances.
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