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![Baptiste Piqueret](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/24e725_6ce999edd1d24c6389fadcf59f05cc8a~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_295,h_360,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/944299415592934_edited.png)
Baptiste Piqueret
Interested in the behaviour of ants and how they use their refined sense of smell, I joined the Ulrich lab in 2022 to study brood care in clonal raider ants, Ooceraea biroi.
During my Ph.D., I studied the learning and memory of ants, and tested if they could be used as bio-detectors of human cancer. More specifically, I trained ants to associate the volatile compounds emitted by cancer cells with a reward, and see that ants were able to discriminate cancer samples from cancer-free ones based on olfaction. Later, I tested if ants were able to do the same with a whole organism, and I demonstrated that they could detect cancer based on the urine of tumour-bearing mice. I also used chemistry tools to identify the compounds emitted by cancer samples.