“Genetically modifying the nanowires made them 100 times more responsive to ammonia than they were originally,” said Yassir Lekbach, the paper’s co-lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in Microbiology at UMass Amherst.

Source: https://businesswest.com/blog/umass-amherst-researchers-invent-electronic-nose/

They discovered that the nanowires act as a light absorber under 365-nm light while also serving as an electron-donor when exposed to 255-nm light, which helps to regulate photoresponsivity at varying wavelengths.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-self-powered-ultraviolet-photodetector.html