'We looked at how the most common type of e-nose sensors - metal oxide or 'MOx' receptors - sample the air around them. This is a critical factor in the performance of all noses. We then compared it with the performance of odorant receptors from the common house fly, Drosophila.'

'We already know that fly receptors, unlike most other bio-receptors, are not very specific. Even so, it really surprised us how much narrower the responses of the MOx sensors were than the biological ones,' said Trowell.

'We also found that the fly bio-receptors outperformed the MOx sensors in their levels of independence. The fly seems to make a range of broadly tuned receptors that are independent of each other and human engineers haven't yet worked out how to do this,' he added.

These results were published in the Wednesday edition of PLoS ONE.