Minor workers of the ant species Colobopsis explodens are dissected to isolate the wax-like content stored in their hypertrophied mandibular gland reservoirs for subsequent solvent-extraction and analysis by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The annotation and identification of volatile constituents using the open-source software MetaboliteDetector is also described.
Hoenigsberger, M., Kopchinskiy, A. G., Parich, A., Hiller, K., Laciny, A., Zettel, H., Lim, L. B., Salim, K. A., Druzhinina, I. S., Schuhmacher, R. Isolation of Mandibular Gland Reservoir Contents from Bornean 'Exploding Ants' (Formicidae) for Volatilome Analysis by GC-MS and MetaboliteDetector. J. Vis. Exp. (138), e57652, doi:10.3791/57652 (2018).