A Barcoded Polymer-Based Cross-Reactive Spectroscopic Sensor Array for Organic Volatiles

Cell-Based Chemical Safety Assessment and Therapeutic Discovery Using Array-Based Sensors

Synthetic chemicals are widely used in food, agriculture, and medicine, making chemical safety assessments necessary for environmental exposure. In addition, the rapid determination of chemical drug efficacy and safety is a key step in therapeutic discoveries. Cell-based screening methods are non-invasive as compared with animal studies. Cellular phenotypic changes can also provide more sensitive indicators of chemical effects than conventional cell viability. Array-based cell sensors can be engineered to maximize sensitivity to changes in cell phenotypes, lowering the threshold for detecting cellular responses under external stimuli. Overall, array-based sensing can provide a robust strategy for both cell-based chemical risk assessments and therapeutics discovery.

Beverage and Food Fragrance Biotechnology, Novel Applications, Sensory and Sensor Techniques: An Overview

Flavours and fragrances are especially important for the beverage and food industries. Biosynthesis or extraction are the two main ways to obtain these important compounds that have many different chemical structures. Consequently, the search for new compounds is challenging for academic and industrial investigation. This overview aims to present the current state of art of beverage fragrance biotechnology, including recent advances in sensory and sensor methodologies and statistical techniques for data analysis. An overview of all the recent findings in beverage and food fragrance biotechnology, including those obtained from natural sources by extraction processes (natural plants as an important source of flavours) or using enzymatic precursor (hydrolytic enzymes), and those obtained by de novo synthesis (microorganisms' respiration/fermentation of simple substrates such as glucose and sucrose), are reviewed. Recent advances have been made in what concerns "beverage fragrances construction" as also in their application products. Moreover, novel sensory and sensor methodologies, primarily used for fragrances quality evaluation, have been developed, as have statistical techniques for sensory and sensors data treatments, allowing a rapid and objective analysis.