Oligopeptides-based gas sensing for food quality control

In this work a new kind of electronic nose, based on modified quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) array of gas sensors, is presented. The QCM surfaces have been covered with gold nanoparticles (GNPs) bearing short peptide moieties. The array was composed of eight modified QCM, one carrying only GNPs without the peptide moiety and seven modified with peptides. Three peptides were synthesized in order to test the response variability to different amino acid sequences of the same length. Electronic nose has been challenged with pure compounds and real food sample analysis demonstrating its ability to discriminate between different aroma patterns after simple statistical analysis such as PCA. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.