Fruit flies help in detection of explosives and drugs

Professor Thomas Nowotny has found that fruit flies can identify odours from illicit drugs and explosive substances almost as accurately as wine odour, which the insects are naturally attracted to because it smells like fermenting fruit.

Published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, the study is said to bring scientists closer to developing electronic noses (e-noses) that closely replicate the olfactory sense of animals.

The hope is that such e-noses will be much more sensitive and much faster than the currently commercially available e-noses that are typically based on metal-oxide sensors and are slow compared to a biological nose.

Prof Nowotny, Professor of Informatics at Sussex University, led the study alongside researchers from Monash University and CSIRO in Australia.

‘Dogs can smell drugs and people have trained bees to detect explosives. Here we are looking more for what it is in the nose - which receptors - that allows animals to do this,’ he said in a statement. ‘In looking at fruit flies, we have found that, contrary to our expectation, unfamiliar odours, such as from explosives, were not only recognised but broadly recognised with the same accuracy as odours more relevant to a fly’s behaviour.’