Researchers have made transgenic ants whose antennae glow green under a microscope, revealing how the insects’ brains process alarming smells.

The findings identify three unique brain regions that respond to alarm signals. In these areas, called glomeruli, the ants’ nerve endings intersect. The work was posted on the bioRxiv preprint server on 29 December 2022¹ and has not yet been peer reviewed.

“Ants are like little walking chemical factories,” says study co-author Daniel Kronauer, a biologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City.

The researchers created transgenic clonal raider ants by injecting the insects’ eggs with a vector carrying a gene for a green fluorescent protein combined with one that expresses a molecule that indicates calcium activity in the brain.

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These findings help to “understand how olfaction works at a molecular level, how it’s processed, and how the individual responds and how this leads to a society response in their natural world”, says Juergen Liebig, a biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “One can now use these transgenic tools and make transgenic ants to study the function of specific genes,” he says, “and how this potentially affects the organization of ant society.”

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