RSC Advances Blog

You can find me with great infrequency (ahem) pacing the wine, beers and spirit aisles of the supermarket trying to select the best wine for the occasion that I may be attending, be it dinner at friends or watching season four of Game of Thrones, alone, with a pizza. It may amaze you to know that, despite this penchant for the finer things in life, my wine tasting ability is a work in constant progress. Currently, my selection criterion for a bottle comprises two factors; 1) how pretty is the bottle and 2) how special is the special offer on it?

Finally, to save me from my ignorance, Tu San Park and co-workers have developed a paper microfluidic chip for red wine tasting. Their recent publication in RSC Advances details the development of a colormetric sensor array that can distinguish red wines by grape and oxidation state using principal component analysis. This isn’t just good news for me; This could be employed in the wine industry as a simple  and low cost quality control check, helping to minimise the variation inherent by employing taste panellists.

What is exciting about this assay is the room for development. The authors have been investigating the alignment of the assay with a smartphone application that would be able to image the areas of interest and measure the red, green and blue pixel intensities. This data would then be reduced for principal component analysis.

The benefits of this low cost, portable check are obvious, especially for small wineries and also, small wine drinkers, like myself.

To find out more, click below to read the full article in RSC Advances. It’s free to access for the next 4 weeks:

Paper microfluidics for red wine tasting, Tu San Park, Cayla Baynes, Seong-In Cho and Jeong-Yeol Yoon, RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 24356–24362 (DOI: 10.1039/C4RA01471E)

Sarah Brown is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. Sarah hung up her lab coat after finishing her PhD and post-doctorate in nanotechnology for diagnostics and therapeutics and now works in academic publishing. When not trying to explain science through ridiculous analogies, you can often find her crocheting, baking or climbing, but not all at once.

By Sarah Brown, web writer for RSC Advances

Superhuman olfaction isn’t right up there on my list of desired super powers for a number of reasons that I won’t share here; however, an enhanced appreciation for the detection of various gases is underrated.

For example, the ability to detect toxic gases is of huge benefit, particularly at levels before they pose danger to humans. Electronic noses (E-noses) have been created from nanowire arrays as devices for sensing technology; however, most E-noses require operating temperatures of over 200 °C, which may be a limiting factor in their practical application.

Writing in RSC Advances, Chatchawal Wongchoosuk and co-workers describe the fabrication of a ZnO-based E-nose that operates at room temperature and can detect down to the ppb level. The ZnO nanowires were surface modified to include ZnO-ZnAl₂O₃ and ZnO-Zn₂TiO₄ core-shell nanowires, which formed electrical connections by self-assembly. Ultraviolet light, positioned above the sensors, was used to generate electron hole pairs and oxygen species, which, on reaction with a gas or gases could change the layer width of the nanowires and ultimately lead to the detection and characterisation of the substance.

The ability for the E-nose to operate sensitively at room temperature makes a lot of scents and these developments are not something to be sniffed at (groan!)

Read the full article by clicking the link below – free to access until 16th October:

Electronic nose for toxic gas detection based on photostimulated core–shell nanowires
Chatchawal Wongchoosuk, Kittitat Subannajui, Chunyu Wang, Yang Yang, Firat Güder, Teerakiat Kerdcharoen, Volker Cimalla and Margit Zacharias, RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 35084–35088, DOI: 10.1039/C4RA06143H

Sarah Brown is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. Sarah hung up her lab coat after finishing her PhD and post-doctorate in nanotechnology for diagnostics and therapeutics and now works in academic publishing. When not trying to explain science through ridiculous analogies, you can often find her crocheting, baking or climbing, but not all at once.