Researchers say they can be used to track down landmines

Oct 19, 2012 08:17 GMT  ·  By

Scientists working with the City University of New York claim that they have succeeded in engineering mice whose sense of smell is 500 times more powerful than that of their run-off-the-mill counterparts.

Technology Review informs us that, in order to grow these super mice, a molecular neurobiologist named Charlotte D'Hulst toyed with their odor-sensing neurons.

More precisely, genetic modification allowed this researcher to make sure the mice born and raised in her laboratory had significantly more such neurons than ordinary rodents do.

Thus, whereas a common mouse only has 4,000 odor-sensing neurons, these super mice have 10,000 – 1,000,000 each.

Moreover, half of these neurons could be made responsible for detecting TNT, “possibly amplifying the detection limit for this odor 500-fold.”

For the time being, mice, together with dogs and various gadgets and gizmos, are already being used to identify landmines in as many as 70 countries worldwide.

However, training dogs and rodents to perform such tasks is a rather expensive business, as are metal detectors, radars and magnetometers.

Charlotte D'Hulst says that, by contrast, these engineered mice would most likely require no prior training before being used to sniff buried bombs, due to the fact that their being so sensitive to TNT would trigger involuntary bodily responses whenever they stumble upon it.

In other words, coming in close contact with the smell of explosives such as TNT would push these mice's olfactory system into overdrive, and impact on their bodily movements.

“We can only hope that our mice will show a seizure behavior upon detecting landmines. We won't have to work with food rewards; we will probably use some radio signaling system. A chip implant may track, report, and record their behaviors,” Charlotte D'Hulst commented on this project.

The only downsides to using these mice would be that some buried mines release no odors, and that soil and water conditions can negatively impact on the mice's sniffing abilities.