US (CA): Uni develops electronic fruit nose
"We are involved in a project geared towards developing rapid methods to evaluate ripeness and flavour of fruits," said paper-author Dr. Florence Negre-Zkharov. "We evaluated an electronic nose to see if it can differentiate maturity of fruit, specifically melons. The goal is to develop a tool that can be used post-harvest to better evaluate produce, and develop better breeds."
Usually the way to evaluate a fruit's ripeness is gas chromatography. However, this takes up to an hour to analyse a single sample, rendering the technique impractical outside of a laboratory situation. Dr. Negre-Zakharov and her team wanted to determine if the much cruder— but much faster— electronic nose was able to determine if the melon they used in the experiment were ripe. It was.
"It's quite encouraging technology for the purposes of determining maturity," she said.
The project is part of the Specialty Crops Research Initiative, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, which was "established to solve critical industry issues through research and extension activities." Dr. Negre-Zkharov and her team are working on quantitative methods of evaluating fruit-ripeness in the hopes that it will help the industry produce better quality produce.
"It's very impressive that the electronic nose system can do a type of gas chromatography in about a minute.
Not only is the process fast and effective, it is also simplistic, which holds promise for home testing.
The next step is to test the electronic nose out in the field to see if it can still prove effective when confronted with so many background scents in addition to that of the fruit.
Source: www.sciencecodex.com
