Highly-sensitive detection of medical chemical substances using taste sensor and automatized production of chemicals with desired taste

用Langmuir-Blodgett(LB)法获得了较薄的脂膜。研究了LB膜的膜电阻、电容等电化学特性。膜阻抗测试表明，随着产生苦味的化学物质的加入，LB膜的电阻增大，而其他表现为酸、甜、咸和鲜味的物质对膜的电阻影响不大。这意味着苦味物质强烈地结合在LB膜上，也暗示了多种医用化学物质产生苦味的机制。此外，利用一种神经网络模型将味觉传感器的电位模式转换为味觉质量，开发了味觉识别系统。研究还表明，在模拟大脑中一组神经元的耦合振子非线性系统中，混沌在识别过程中起着重要的作用。当不同于已知信息的信息被输入到系统中时，会出现混沌振荡，就像在实际生物系统中观察到的那样，从而获得了以LB膜为感受器部分，耦合振子非线性系统为识别部分构建味觉识别系统的可能性。

Thin lipid membranes were obtained using a Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) method. Electrochemical characteristics of the LB membranes such as the membrane resistance and capacitance were studied. This membrane-impedance measurement clarified that the electric resistance of LB membrane increased with addition of chemical substances producing bitterness, whereas it changed a little by other substances showing sourness, sweetness, saltiness and umami taste. This fact implies that bitter substances are strongly bound to the LB membrane and also suggests the mechanism of bitterness produced by many kinds of medical chemical substances.Furthermore, taste-recognition system was developed using a kind of neural-network model to transform electric potential patterns from the taste sensor to taste qualities. It was also shown that chaos plays an important role in recognition process in a coupled-oscillator nonlinear system which mimics the a group of neurons in brain. When information that is much dofferent from already-known information was input to the system, chaotic oscillations appeared, as observed in real biological systems.As a result, we have obtained a possibility of taste-recognition system constructed from LB membranes as a receptor part and coupled-oscillator nonlinear system as a recognition part.