2020 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Development of human olfactory receptor-expressing cell arrays for the quantification of all odour molecules

Research Project

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Project/Area Number	20K20370
Project/Area Number (Other)	18H05359 (2018-2019)
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Pioneering)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund (2020) Single-year Grants (2018-2019)
Review Section	Medium-sized Section 38:Agricultural chemistry and related fields
Research Institution	Osaka University
Principal Investigator	KURODA SHUN'ICHI 大阪大学, 産業科学研究所, 教授 (60263406)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	立松健司大阪大学, 産業科学研究所, 助教 (00322743)
Project Period (FY)	2018-06-29 – 2021-03-31
Keywords	ヒト嗅覚受容体 / バイオセンサー
Outline of Final Research Achievements	Olfactory information alone is difficult to accurately represent and reproduce, as there is no basic odour that represents all the hundreds of thousands of odour molecules that humans can detect. On the other hand, sensory testing based on taste and smell is very important in the development of products that come into direct contact with humans, such as foods, beverages, brewed products and cosmetics, but it is highly dependent on the qualifications of the testers, which makes reproducibility and high-throughput testing extremely difficult, and above all, accurate sharing of sensory test results difficult. In order to achieve an 'accurate representation and reproduction' of olfactory information, it is necessary to develop a 'sensor' and a 'new representation method' to accurately measure all the odour molecules that humans can perceive. In order to do this, they have developed a 'human olfactory receptor expression cell array'.
Free Research Field	応用細胞工学
Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements	ヒト嗅覚受容体全て（約400種類）を機能を保ったまま、培養細胞上で発現させることはできなかったが、本研究により、それが可能になった。その結果、ヒト嗅覚を完全に再現した「ヒト嗅覚受容体発現細胞アレイ」が「人工鼻」として可能になり、匂い分子に反応した時に生じる嗅覚受容体活性化パターンは、ヒトが感じることが出来る全ての匂いを定量的に表現し、さらにデジタルデータ化できる可能性を秘めている。これは、ヒト５感のうち、最後まで残された感覚情報を表現する世界初の手法となる。