The chemical senses are sentinels to the world around us, allowing all species to detect safety, danger, and other changes in the environment. Unlocking them is a step toward reducing pollution, infectious disease, and habitat loss for a healthier planet for all.
Research at Monell seeks to understand how the odors animals emit can signal disease and how odors in our environment influence the health of the ecosystem and its inhabitants.
Building a diagnostic tool to detect early-stage ovarian cancer by using odor biomarkers in blood was a research focus of the late George Preti, PhD. He and colleagues compared a prototype instrument against trained dogs and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to detect volatile molecules emanating from blood donated from ovarian cancer patients. Both the dogs and the cancer-sniffing prototype determined that plasma from cancer patients gives off an odor signature different from other healthy individuals.
Certain volatile chemicals in the feces of rabies-vaccinated raccoons and striped skunks are related to signs of active adaptive immunity in the animals. The findings suggest that monitoring fecal volatiles in wildlife and domesticated animal scat may serve as an important infectious disease surveillance to detect viruses in animals before they make the leap to humans.
