Their study, published in Advanced Materials, demonstrates a new way to build highly sensitive chemical sensors that work much like a living nose. The team focused on an odor receptor called MhOR5, which comes from a tiny wingless insect known as the jumping bristletail. To build the device, the scientists first recreated the insect’s odor receptor in the laboratory. Using a special chemical linking process, the researchers successfully attached the insect odor receptors to graphene field-effect transistors, or gFETs. This is the first time the MhOR5 odor receptor has been directly integrated with a graphene-based transistor to create a label-free sensor for detecting small organic compounds.