Ants vs. Dogs in Cancer-Sniffing Showdown? Perhaps
Rebecca West
A team of researchers in France has reportedly trained ants to recognize the smell of cancer cells, which could have the potential for important human applications.
Back in 2012, scientists at Vanderbilt University made the rather unsurprising discovery that ants have four to five times more smell receptors than nearly every other insect. In fact, ants even use their keen sense of smell to communicate with and distinguish between other ants in heavily populated colonies.
Predominantly haling from Sorbonne University, the researchers decided to experiment with every picnicker's worst enemy to use as a source for cancer detection. During their work, the first group of ants to be trained belonged to the species Formica fusca, which are commonly found throughout Europe. The first task presented to them was to differentiate between human cancer cells provided in different formats.
So how did they pull it off? Easy. They placed a sugar solution directly next to the cancer cells. Even after the sugar was removed from the test set-up, the ants still sought out the cancer cells, which they continued to associate with the sugar.
Study members then carried out a similar test, but this time they added healthy human breast cells as well as the cancer cells. After obtaining positive results in the second series of tests, they pushed forward and trained the insets to differentiate between two distinct cancer cell lines.
Ultimately, the ants were remarkably skilled at recognizing targeted cancer cells after only three trial runs.
The researchers then compared the results to that of canines and noted, "Ants are equivalent to dogs in terms of detection abilities. In some respects, ants surpass dogs because they need an extremely shorter training time (30 minutes compared to 6-12 months for a dog) and a reduced cost of training and maintenance."
Dogs do have some advantages at this point over their minuscule competitors. For one thing, ants generally don't have long lifespans, but it depends on the species. Also, dogs have been trained to detect signs of cancer in breath, plasma, urine, and saliva samples. Unless you're terrified of dogs, it would be easier to let a canine do that than letting an ant (or ants plural) crawl on you.
The scientists involved in the study also want to know if ants could be useful in other real-world applications where sniffer dogs are presently employed. "Our approach could potentially be adapted to a range of other complex odor detection tasks, including the detection of narcotics, explosives, spoiled food, or other diseases (malaria, infections, diabetes for instance),” they added.
If you'd like to learn more, their findings were published in the journal iScience.
