[The Epoch Times, January 27, 2023](Reported by Epoch Times reporter Chen Juncun) As we all know,AntThey can lift many times their body weight.Now, scientists have discovered that the tiny insects have another “superpower”—they can learn from micethe urinesmell“Smell” whether they are suffering fromcancer. Scientists will investigate whether this ability also applies to human urine.
According to the British National News Agency (PA), previous research has shown that severalcancercause sweat andthe urineofsmellchanges happened. And in a new study, French researchers found that,AntDifferences in these tastes can be distinguished to screen for cancer.
Ants could be used as low-cost bioassays to screen cancer patients because the insects have very sensitivethe sense of smell。
The study’s author, Patrizia d’Ettorre, a professor at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University in France, said the ants are easy to train, learn quickly and are efficient at detecting , and the cost of raising them is not high.
In the study, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers exposed 70 black mountain ants (Formica fusca) to urine samples from mice, including Tumor and tumor-free mice.
After three trials, the ants could tell the difference between the smell of urine from healthy mice and those with cancer.
They used rewards to train the ants in an associative learning method to familiarize them with the smell of the urine of cancer-affected mice, D’Ettore told the National News Agency. They thus learned the link between the smell and cancer.
The study confirms that ants can tell the difference between the smell of urine from healthy mice and those with cancer, D’Ettore said. This is closer to the real-life situation than using artificially cultured cancer cells.
“We were amazed by the efficiency and reliability of these ants,” she said.
The researchers said they wanted to see if ants could also identify cancer patients from the smell of human urine.
Previous studies have shown that dogs can be trained to detect cancer in people from the smell of their urine. But the human nose cannot smell cancer in urine.
The Epoch Times previously reported, puppies can also sniff out people’s blood samples for lung cancer with nearly 97 percent accuracy. This brings new hope for the early diagnosis of lung cancer.
Editor in charge: Li Ming