More than apples and oranges - Detecting cancer with a fruit fly's antenna

Abstract

Cancer cells and non-cancer cells differ in their metabolism and they emit distinct volatile compound profiles, allowing to recognise cancer cells by their scent. Insect odorant receptors are excellent chemosensors with high sensitivity and a broad receptive range unmatched by current gas sensors. We thus investigated the potential of utilising the fruit fly's olfactory system to detect cancer cells. Using in vivo calcium imaging, we recorded an array of olfactory receptor neurons on the fruit fly's antenna. We performed multidimensional analysis of antenna responses, finding that cell volatiles from different cell types lead to characteristic response vectors. The distances between these response vectors are conserved across flies and can be used to discriminate healthy mammary epithelial cells from different types of breast cancer cells. This may expand the repertoire of clinical diagnostics, and it is the first step towards electronic noses equipped with biological sensors, integrating artificial and biological olfaction.

Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots

“…Rapid, accurate and reliable recognition of chemical vapors is crucial for several applications in medicine [1][2][3][4], homeland security [5][6][7][8] and environmental monitoring [9]. To address challenges in chemical sensing, instruments combining an array of cross-selective chemical transducers with a pattern recognition engine, popularly referred to electronic noses or e-noses, have been proposed [10,11].…”

Olfactory biosensor for insect semiochemicals analysis by impedance sensing of odorant-binding proteins on interdigitated electrodes

“…It also made the impedance biosensor be a good candidate for practical applications in the near future. OBP-1F and OR1740 Helional -10 À 9 M - Vidic et al (2008) In our study, by directly targeting the insects′ sense of smell, interactions between OBPs and different semiochemicals could advance the progress in the understanding of chemical communication systems of insects, which showed strong potentials for applications in many fields, such as control of semiochemical pollution, insect vector-borne diseases, olfactory-based insect control technology, and even cancer diagnosis (Carey and Carlson, 2011;Wehrenfennig et al, 2013;Strauch et al, 2014). With more functional amino acid residues or peptides interpreted by molecular docking from the natural sequences of OBPs, we believe that along with insects OBPs, mutant proteins or peptide chains could be synthesized to be used as promising recognition elements in the future biosensors for practical applications.…”

“…Excitingly, recent studies showed that insects could even detect chemicals that do not occur in the insects′ natural environment, such as TNT and volatile compounds emitted from cancer cells (Marshall, et al, 2010;Strauch et al, 2014), which inspired us to broaden the applications of insect semiochemicals researches.…”

“…Some recent researches indicated that the insect olfaction with broad receptive ranges for chemosensing could provide distinguished responses to a variety of chemicals even if these chemicals do not occur in the animal′s natural environment, such as volatile compounds emitted from cancer cells (Strauch et al, 2014). The exceptional olfactory ability had inspired researchers to develop biosensors, which were mainly based on insect behaviors or isolated organs such as antenna (Schroth et al, 1999;Schöning and Poghossian, 2002;Fernández-Grandon et al, 2011), for different analytes detection, like 2,46-trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other explosives (Repasky et al, 2006;Rains et al, 2008), and even for diseases control and diagnosis (Carey and Carlson, 2011;Strauch et al, 2014). Because of the difficulties in interpreting quantifiable behavior responses and the short life time of insect organs (Fernández-Grandon et al, 2011;Wehrenfennig et al, 2013), odorant molecules of natural olfactory systems should be integrated into artificial systems to build specific sensors for semiochemicals detection.…”

Smell Sensors Based on Odorant Binding Proteins

“…It offers great help in designing specific biosensors for odorant detections. With odorants, even that did not occur in the insects' natural environment, such as volatile compounds emitted from cancer cells [21,22], have been successfully detected, OBPs-based biosensors provide promising approaches for chemical molecular sensing, as well as for precise binding functions investigating this kind of special olfactory protein [15].…”