UT Research: Electronic tongue tastes international acclaim
While artists may complain that
critics’ taste exist only in their mouths, UT engineers and scientists have now
successfully placed it on a silicon chip. Electrical and computer engineering professor
Dean Neikirk, and chemistry professors Eric Anslyn, John McDevitt and Jason Shear
collaborated on work that has gained international attention.
Using chemical sensors, they designed an electronic tongue that mimics the real thing. Like its natural counterpart, it has the potential to someday distinguish between a dazzling array of subtle flavors using a combination of the four elements of taste: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. And in some ways it has outdone Mother Nature: it has the capacity to analyze the chemical composition of a substance as well.
The device, which has the potential to incorporate hundreds of chemical microsensors on a silicon wafer, has a multitude of potential uses. The food and beverage industry wants to develop it for rapid testing of new products, but it could also be used to analyze cholesterol levels in blood, or cocaine in urine, or toxins in water.
"The most pleasant aspect of our work has been the really neat way the expertise of the various team members has meshed. This has been a great example of how science and engineering can work together to produce something that will hopefully be of real utility," said Neikirk. He can be reached at 512-471-8549 or at neikirk@mail.utexas.edu.
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