United Kingdom: A new study by scientists has found that ants can detect the scent of cancer in urine. According to the findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the insects could be used as a cost-effective way to identify cancers in patients.
Study author Professor Patrizia d’Ettorre, of Sorbonne Paris Nord University, remarked that “ants can be used as bio-detectors to discriminate healthy individuals from tumour-bearing ones. They are easy to train, learn fast, are very efficient, and are not expensive to keep.”
The researchers exposed 70 ants belonging to the species known as Formica fusca to urine samples from mice with and without tumours.
After three trials, the ants were able to identify the difference between the urine odour of healthy mice and that of mice with tumors. “This is because ants have a very sensitive olfactory system,” the researchers observed.
During the research, ants were trained to associate the smell of tumours with a reward by placing a drop of sugar water in front of the urine of animals with cancer. The ants spent significantly more time around the urine of cancerous mice than that of healthy mice.
The research team wants to take it a step further and see if the ants can do the same for human urine. Furthermore, they noted that ants have an edge over dogs and other animals because the latter are time-consuming to train. While dogs can take around six months to train, it took only 10 minutes and three training rounds to lock in the ants’ smell association for the study.
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