A LITERALLY groundbreaking study in the USA has found that ants can be trained to sniff out cancerous tumours.
A paper published last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal reported on the proof-of-concept trial, in which the six-legged creatures were able to differentiate between the smell of urine from healthy mice and from mice with cancerous tumours.
Titled Ants act as olfactory bio-detectors of tumours in patient-derived xenograft mice, the report noted that tumour cells are characterised by specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can be used as cancer biomarkers.
Incredibly, the training took about 10 minutes, after which the ants spent about 20% more time in the vicinity of the learned odour.
"Our study demonstrates that ants reliably detect tumour cues in mice urine and have the potential to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors," the authors from the Institut Curie in Paris wrote.
Further trials are now planned to broaden the results and hopefully show that ants can have a similar success in detecting cancer in humans.
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