Quantitating formic acid in an ant

[sara.ee]

Hello all,

How can we quantitate formic acid that an ant has? Do you know how much is it? Can we use quartz crystal microbalance ?
I do not have any information about it.

Any help will be appreciated.

[Consumer Products Guy]

Blend/homogenize ants with water, filter, use HPLC on a specialty organic acid column, conductivity detector? That's where I'd start.

[sara.ee]

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I searched over the net and surveyed some websites about this title. But it was difficult for me and I understood nothing. because it is not my major but I should know the answer. Could you please give me more details? The most important thing that I want to know is that how can we quantitate acid formic of ant ? by killing an ant?? Whatever I understand from your text is that, there is a method called HPLC for analyzing copmonents. What do you mean by Blend/homogenize ants with water, filter ? and conductivity detector?

Thanks in advance.

[coffee bean]

I can't imagine a way to quantitate formic acid in ants without murdering a few of them. Actually, you should get several ants (in order to get an average) and extract the formic acid - with water, as suggested. In this process, you will have casualties. Then, filter the extract in order to prevent ant bodies to reach your equipment - and save the dead bodies so their relatives can claim them. Inject the filtered extract in a suitable liquid chromatograph. Any old Antek might do.

Maybe with a nanoLC you could avoid killing an ant

Jokes aside, Consumer Products Guy gave you a nice starting point for a chromatographer.

Take several ants, crush them in order to break the exoskeleton and internal organs into tiny pieces (or even better, almost homogeneous), add a little (known) amount of water, mix thoroughly, filter in a .45 micron filter (maybe syringeless like Uni-Prep) and inject in a liquid chromatograph with a conductivity detector and a specialty column as Consumer Products Guy suggested. If it doesn't work, then you can start tweaking.

You could distill ant bodies as it used to be done to get formic acid, but I guess it would take a lot more ants.