(Delicious, you might think … though indole in high concentrations has a faecal, rather than a foodie odour.) Much of western cooking has for centuries unknowingly combined ingredients that share flavour compounds (for example, eggs and butter), unlike East Asian cuisine which combines ingredients that lack shared compounds (for example, garlic and soy sauce).
In an original piece of research for VICE, Dr Matan Shelomi, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, compared studies that broke down cannabis and human sweat into individual chemicals to see if there were any shared compounds.
In an original piece of research for VICE, Dr. Matan Shelomi, a researcher at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, compared studies that broke down cannabis and human sweat into individual chemicals to see if there were any shared compounds.
The remaining shared compounds eluted in low-polarity fractions, but only in P. macrostachya did such fractions elicit seed-carrying.
The lack of behavioral response to shared compounds does not support previously proposed hypotheses that AG ants carry AG seeds because the seeds resemble ant brood [19], [23].
Although P. macrostachya was extracted with hexane and the other two species with ethyl acetate, all extracts did contain the shared compounds identified as the AG seed signature.
It is reasonable that the taxonomically diverse AG species should have arrived at their interaction with ants through different biochemical pathways but this leaves the role of the shared compounds unexplained.
We detected seven phenolic and terpenoid volatiles common to seeds of all or most of the AG species, but a blend of the shared compounds was not attractive to the AG ant Camponotus femoratus.
Shared compounds identified above as the "AG seed signature" did occur in the low-polarity fractions of all three species analyzed, but only in P. macrostachya did such fractions elicit seed-carrying behavior.
We then used only those 170 shared compounds in our mixed-sex analyses.
