Photo: Elliotte Rusty Harold/Shutterstock
A new study found that ants can be trained to detect cancer in urine. And although these lack noses, they use olfactory receptors on their antennae to help them find food or sniff out potential mates.
The research published on January 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, explains that the scientists trained nearly three dozen silky ants to use these acute olfactory receptors to find tumors.
In a lab, experts grafted slices of breast cancer tumors from human samples onto mice and taught the 35 insects to “associate the urine of tumor-bearing rodents with sugar,” according to The Washington Post.
After being on a Petri dish, heAnimals spent 20% more time around urine samples containing cancerous tumors compared to healthy urine.
Lead study author and ethologist at Sorbonne Paris North University in France, Baptiste Piqueret, told The Washington Post that the ants “just want to eat sugar.”
Detect abnormalities through smell
Because tumor cells contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that researchers can use as biomarkers for cancer, animals like dogs, and now ants, they can quickly train themselves to detect these abnormalities through their sense of smell.
However, the researchers believe that ants “may have an advantage over dogs and other animals that require [más] time to train.”
The great advantage of this new discovery is that the sooner cancer is detected, the sooner treatment can begin. The researchers are hopeful that cancer-detecting ants have the potential “to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer biosensors”they wrote in their study.
Piqueret explains that “the results are very promising.” However, he cautioned that “it is important to know that we are far from using them as a daily way of detecting cancer.”
Ants are animals that live in a world of smells and depend on this sense, in fact, some species are completely blind. Others They are so dependent on scent that those who lose track of a pheromone trail march in circles, dying of exhaustion.
Extending antennae, insects detect and display chemical signals to find food, swarm prey, detect colony mates, protect their young.
This chemical communication helps ants build complex societies of queens and workers that operate so in sync with scent that scientists call some colonies “superorganisms.”
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