Last updated on December 17th, 2020 at 09:53 pm
When I say snakes, bees, ants and scorpions, what comes to your mind at an instant? Well, you could humorously say, “they are not as smart as humans”, or that they all possess venom. If not deadly, this chemical injected in your body can at least leave a very conspicuous mark on your body as well as psyche.
Bee venom and snake venom has been widely studied in order to understand their lethality to develop effective treatments, or to discover a possible cure for any other human ailment. An intriguing research conducted on ant venom, specifically the bull ants of Australia, has been focused on, not developing a novel treatment of any sort, but to understand how this venom makes our nociceptors (pain receptors) to react. Being infamous for its notoriously painful sting, a research team in Queensland set out to look for a hive of bull ants to begin their research.
“A colleague found some in Brisbane and dropped them off and asked if we wanted to study them.” Dr. Robinson said until now, there was no precedent for getting the venom out of ants – other than to get themselves stung. “But that’s not particularly useful,” he said, “because you want the venom to study it.”
The ant was held over a tube, just like in case of snakes, and drop by drop the venom as collected.
“We were able to get milligram quantities of venom this way, which is a huge amount for us,” Dr. Robinson said. “The toxins we identify are never going to be candidates [for] drugs. They cause pain, but they’re not going to be used to treat pain. We hope to find new chemical strategies that will teach us more about pain itself, and that information can be used to make better treatments.”
Ant venom wasn’t the first choice of researchers when it came to studying poison. This is essentially due to their small size and in turn their low poison yield. This bull ant study revealed the presence of a multitude of peptide toxins which are surprisingly similar to the ones found in wasps and bees. The venom targets our pain receptors and causes them to fire the pain-sensing neurons. A study of this stimulation can unravel the workings of cell physiology that leads to a specific response in our nervous system. Having broad outcomes in future research, ants can really help us understand our nervous system and develop compounds that block pain.
Reference- http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/9/eaau4640
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Abhijeet is a 4th-year Undergraduate Student at IIT Kharagpur. His major inclination is towards exploring the science behind the things of our day-to-day life.
He is a Life Sciences Graduate from the University of Mumbai, DAE, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences. Writing a brief knit story to connect with people and using words instead of the usual bs, are the go-to choices under his sleeves. A keen follower of the religion of "football" and a firsthand witness of the busy subway station they call research, he sets out to take another look.
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Vishal Singhhttps://www.scilynk.in/author/vishal-singh/
