Swallow the air like a butterfly, detect malignancy like a bee?
In a laboratory setting, honeybees are able to identify the minute aromas of lung cancer, including the disease’s slight odor emanating from a patient’s breath.
Motivated by the remarkable sense of smell possessed by these insects, researchers connected the brains of real bees to electrodes, introduced various fragrances beneath the insects’ antennae, and subsequently captured their neural responses. According to Debajit Saha, a neurological engineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing, “it’s very clear — like day and night — whether [a bee] is responding to a chemical or not.”
As a sort of neural fingerprint for scent, distinct smells elicited distinct patterns of brain activity, as reported by Saha and colleagues in Biosensors and Bioelectronics on June 4. He believes that one day, medical professionals may be able to employ honeybees as living sensors for early disease identification in cancer clinics.
While mechanical odor-sensing devices such as e-noses and other electronic noses do exist, they are not the best. “Biology has this ability to differentiate between very, very similar mixtures, which no other engineered sensors can do,” claims Saha in reference to aroma.
According to Flora Gouzerh, a chemical ecologist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development in Montpellier, scent plays a significant role in the communication processes of many insect species. She claims that “it’s a language” for them.
The notion that animals can detect sickness by scent is not new; in 1989, medical professionals documented a case in which a border collie and a Doberman were able to detect melanoma in their owner. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that canines can smell human perspiration to identify COVID-19 instances (SN: 6/1/22). According to Gouzerh, many insects likely possess the ability to detect sickness as well. For example, it is possible to teach ants to detect the scent of cancer cells cultured in a lab dish. But, she notes, the capabilities of bees haven’t been entirely evident up until now.
Through direct neuronal implantation, scientists can circumvent the need for behavioral training. The team can get the answer right away from the brain, saving weeks of training a dog to sit when it smells something fishy, for example.
The researchers performed bee brain surgery, adding wires to the area that processes smells, while the honeybees were kept in place by 3-D printed plastic harnesses and some wax. Like a salesperson misting perfume at a counter, a gadget sprayed air into the antennae of the insects.
Every puff might have a mix of aromas, like what healthy individuals exhale. An additional blend imitated the breath miasma of lung cancer patients, which consists of unique scents that are completely imperceptible to human senses. Ninety-three percent of the time, researchers were able to differentiate between the two types of artificial air using electrical signals that they retrieved from the bees’ brains.
Saha’s group collected air that lingered above lab-grown lung cells in a different experiment. The air samples collected near cells of two cancer types—small-cell lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer—could be distinguished from one another by the bees.
The ability of bees to detect additional trace odors, such as those released by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, generally referred to as everlasting chemicals or PFAS, has also been demonstrated by ongoing research in Saha’s group. He remarks, “That really blew my mind.” “PFAS in the environment are extremely difficult to find.”
The goal of Saha’s team is to test the breath of real cancer patients using their apian fragrance sensor. The main drawback of the gadget, according to him, is that it only lasts a few hours before the bees’ cognitive function deteriorates and their reactions become erratic. However, it processes data quickly and outputs results instantly. Saha claims that his team could hypothetically buzz through more than 100 samples with a single bee brain.
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