A Highly Accurate Inclusive Cancer Screening Test Using Caenorhabditis elegans Scent Detection
Fig 1
C. elegans can respond to cancer cell culture medium and cancer tissue, and detect cancer smells in human urine.
(A) Chemotaxis of wild-type C. elegans to 10-6 and 10-7 dilutions of MEM, EMEM or RPMI medium only, or culture medium from fibroblast (KMST-6 and CCD-112CoN), colorectal cancer (SW480, COLO201 and COLO205), breast cancer (MCF7) or gastric cancer (NUGC4, MKN1 and MKN7) cells (n ≥ 5 assays). (B) Chemotaxis of wild type and odr-3 mutants (n ≥ 5 assays) in response to a 10-6 dilution of conditioned culture medium from colorectal, breast or gastric cancer cells. (C) Chemotaxis of wild type to 10-2, 10-3 and 10-4 dilutions of saline with normal and cancer tissue (n ≥ 5 assays). (D) Chemotaxis to normal and cancer tissue by wild-type and odr-3 mutants (n ≥ 5 assays). (E) Chemotaxis of wild type to human urine samples from control subjects (blue bars; c1–c10) or cancer patients (orange bars; p1–p20) at 10-1 dilution (n = 5 assays). (F) Chemotaxis to urine from cancer patients by wild-type and odr-3 mutants at 10-1 dilution (n ≥ 6 assays). Error bars represent SEM. Significant differences from control samples are indicated by * (P < 0.05); ** (P < 0.01); *** (P < 0.001) by Dunnett’s tests (A) or Student’s t-tests (B, C, D, F). † indicates a significant difference (P < 0.05) by Student’s t-tests (A).
doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118699.g001