They discovered that ants can smell cancer

Early diagnosis of cancer is very important in medical sciences, because the earlier it is detected, the better the chances of recovery for patients. Now, a team of French scientists has found it. the ants can “reliably” detect tumor signals.

Although this is basic research and more experiments are needed, results are “promising”, says lead researcher Baptiste Piqueret. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Scientists describe in their articles that animal odor is a method that can increase the rate of early detection of cancer.

Tumor cells are characterized by altered metabolism, producing unique patterns of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can be used as cancer biomarkers. According to the study authors, Through olfactory associative learning, animals can be trained to perceive these substances.

Ants have amazing features Pixabay


For example, trained dogs can detect tumors in cell samples or body odor samples, but they’re not the only ones with this ability, they report.

Among the insects, ants—and especially formica fusca– demonstrated a remarkable ability to learn ecologically relevant scents; They say ants have a “very good” sense of smell and can be trained easily and quickly.

For your education Researchers grafted human breast cancer tumor cells into mice and confirmed that ants can learn to distinguish the odor of healthy rodents from the odor of tumor-bearing animals.

“We show that Ants can detect the presence of cancer in the urine of mice after a short training“, sums up Baptiste Piqueret of the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord on his Twitter account.

The team trained a group of ants in three different trials for a few minutes. associating the odor of the tumor with a candy prize. They were then placed in an arena with healthy, tumorous urine but no reward, and their preferences were measured.

“We discovered that spent more time – 20 percent more – next to the learned smell (tumor urine) than next to the otherPiqueret, who currently works at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, explains this.

Chemical analyzes confirmed that the presence of the tumor altered the odor of the urine, confirming the behavioral results.

“Our research shows that Ants reliably detect tumor signals in mouse urine and have the potential to act as effective and inexpensive cancer biosensors.“, say the authors in their paper, who published another study last year conducted on cancer cell samples with similar results.

But Piqueret stresses that more experiments are needed before we see “an oncologist ant.”These “results are promising”.

reference work: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.1962

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Contact address of the environment department: [email protected]

Source: Informacion

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