Sniffer bees
Anyone entering New Zealand via the International arrivals terminal at Auckland may well have been welcomed by one of MAF Biosecurity’s sniffer dogs. These lovely animals are specially trained to search baggage, mail and cargo to locate undeclared or forgotten agricultural products.
But one day you may be greeted by bees too.
Honeybees can be trained to recognise particular smells and associate that smell with a food reward. When the bees detect the smell, they extend their tongue or proboscis (the Proboscis Extension Reflex or PER) in expectation of food. Honeybees make excellent detectors because they are cheap, quick to train and have extremely low limits of detection.
Inscentinel Ltd. is a biotech company specialising in harnessing this reflex. They have developed a system for temporarily housing bees in thumb-size cartridges within a machine that resembles a handheld vacuum cleaner. When the bees extend their tongues in response to a stimulus, this trips an optical sensor which is detected by the machine.
One potential application of the sniffer bees could be in the diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB). TB is a lung infection caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Breathing in as few as 5 bacteria is all it takes to become infected. It is estimated that one third of the world’s population (that’s 2 billion people) unknowingly have M. tuberculosis in their lungs. These people are ticking TB time bombs; 1 in 10 of them (200 million people) will fall ill with TB at some stage during their life. TB kills almost 2 million people every year, that’s over 4500 people every day.
Current diagnosis methods for TB are labour intensive, involving examination of sputum samples for the tubercle bacterium. What is really needed is a cheap, quick and reliable method that could be easily used in developing countries, which often have little money and few resources. Scientists from New Zealand recently reported that honeybees could be trained to detect some of the volatile compounds released by laboratory grown M. tuberculosis. It remains to be seen whether these volatile compounds are also released during disease. But if it turns out they are present in detectable concentrations in the breath of TB patients, then this could be a game-changer in our battle against this truly terrifying superbug.
Reference: Suckling DM, Sagar RL. (2011). Honeybees Apis mellifera can detect the scent of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis (Edinb), 91(4):327-8.
0 Responses to “Sniffer bees”
I’m surprised this isn’t already happening re: airport security. I remember watching a program that tested the bees years ago. The $ savings would be immense.
[…] Wiles of Infectious Thoughts writes about sniffer bees used to detect tuberculosis. This reminds me of the animals in contraptions on the […]
This is new. But how can you train a bee? It will be harmful and can attack you anytime. Anyway I can’t believe that bees has so much to contribute not only in business ventures like bees for sale but also in detecting some defections of human. Thanks
[…] An article on using bees to diagnose tuberculosis (TB) led to an interview on Breakfast with Spanky (RDU […]
[…] Researchers at the University of Vermont have reported in the Journal of Breath Research (yes there really is a journal dedicated to breath research…) that they could distinguish between the ‘breathprints’ of uninfected mice and mice with lungs stuffed full of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (a common killer of people suffering from the genetic disease cystic fibrosis) or the hospital superbug Staphylococcus aureus. They collected the animal’s breath* and then analysed them using secondary electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (SESI-MS)**. The technique provided unique spectra that could be used to tell all of the groups of mice apart. Which is pretty cool. The hope is that one day doctors will be able to get a patient with a lung infection to breathe into something like an inhaler or breathalyser to collect the patients breath which could then be analysed to detect the volatile compounds released by the infecting bacteria. In this case they had to use what sounds like quite a fancy pants piece of equipment so not exactly bedside diagnostics. I’m holding out for sniffer bees. […]
Are you on FaceBook?
Hi Mark, any reason for asking?
It makes it a bit easier to re-post items. Also, there may be other interesting items I will miss if they aren’t whizzing past my nose.
Ok, seeing as you asked nicely! I’ll try remember to post blog posts there to make it easier to share them 🙂 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Infectious-Thoughts/171583956327917
[…] the exhaled breath – and it so happens that these can be detected, even at low concentrations, by bees. Researchers trained bees to recognize one of these molecules and to respond by sticking out their […]