Ants can detect the scent of cancer in urine - Livescience.com

For the study, published Jan. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences(opens in new tab), scientists trained nearly three dozen silky ants ( Formica fusca) to use these acute olfactory receptors for a different task: finding tumors.

In a lab, scientists grafted slices of breast cancer tumors from human samples onto mice and taught the 35 insects to "associate urine from the tumor-bearing rodents with sugar," according to The Washington Post(opens in new tab).

"They just want to eat sugar," Baptiste Piqueret(opens in new tab), the study's lead author and an ethologist at Sorbonne Paris North University in France, told The Washington Post.

Because tumor cells contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that researchers can use as cancer biomarkers, animals such as dogs — and now ants — can be quickly trained to detect these anomalies through their sense of smell.

The researchers are hopeful that cancer-sniffing ants have the potential "to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors," they wrote in their study.

Jennifer Nalewicki is a Salt Lake City-based journalist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and more.