title: A novel bioelectronic tongue in vivo for highly sensitive bitterness detection with brain-machine interface.
abstract: Animals' gustatory system has been widely acknowledged as one of the most sensitive chemosensing systems, especially for its ability to detect bitterness. Since bitterness usually symbolizes inedibility, the potential to use rodent's gustatory system is investigated to detect bitter compounds. In this work, the extracellular potentials of a group of neurons are recorded by chronically coupling microelectrode array to rat's gustatory cortex with brain-machine interface (BMI) technology. Local field potentials (LFPs), which represent the electrophysiological activity of neural networks, are chosen as target signals due to stable response patterns across trials and are further divided into different oscillations. As a result, different taste qualities yield quality-specific LFPs in time domain which suggests the selectivity of this in vivo bioelectronic tongue. Meanwhile, more quantitative study in frequency domain indicates that the post-stimulation power of beta and low gamma oscillations shows dependence with concentrations of denatonium benzoate, a prototypical bitter compound, and the limit of detection is deduced to be 0.076 μM, which is two orders lower than previous in vitro bioelectronic tongues and conventional electronic tongues. According to the results, this in vivo bioelectronic tongue in combination with BMI presents a promising method in highly sensitive bitterness detection and is supposed to provide new platform in measuring bitterness degree.
authors.affiliation: Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai 200050, China.
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.affiliation: Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
authors.forename: Liujing
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhuang
authors.affiliation: Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; Biomaterials Innovation Research Center, Division of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Electronic address: huning@zju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai 200050, China. Electronic address: cnpwang@zju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Ping
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015374:Biosensing Techniques; D062207:Brain-Computer Interfaces; D004594:Electrophysiology / Q000379:methods*; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000737:chemistry / Q000502:physiology; D009474:Neurons / Q000737:chemistry / Q000502:physiology; D000644:Quaternary Ammonium Compounds / Q000737:chemistry / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D051381:Rats; D013649:Taste / Q000502:physiology; D055697:Taste Perception
chemical_list: D000644:Quaternary Ammonium Compounds; C043414:denatonium
keywords: Bioelectronic tongue in vivo; Biological gustation; Brain–machine interface; Highly sensitive bitterness detection