Isolation of Mandibular Gland Reservoir Contents from Bornean 'Exploding Ants' (Formicidae) for Volatilome Analysis by GC-MS and MetaboliteDetectorMichaela Hoenigsberger 1, Alexey G. Kopchinskiy 2, Alexandra Parich 1, Karsten Hiller 3,4, Alice Laciny 5, Herbert Zettel 5, Linda B.L. Lim 6, Kamariah A. Salim 7, Irina S. Druzhinina 2, Rainer Schuhmacher 1
1Center for Analytical Chemistry, Department of Agrobiotechnology (IFA-Tulln), University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), Austria, 2Institute of Chemical, Environmental and Biological Engineering, TU Vienna, Austria, 3Department of Computational Biology of Infection Research, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany, 4Institute for Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, University of Technology (TU) Braunschweig, Germany, 52nd Zoological Department, Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria, 6Chemical Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei, 7Environmental and Life Sciences, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei
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.