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The Speciality Festival opened doors to a wealth of master’s theses with interesting knowledge.
So far, it has mostly been the Michelin-starred restaurant Noma that has given ants some attention by serving them as a flavourful ingredient in haute cuisine. But otherwise, we’re big on the little creatures. We like to crush them with the sole of our shoe, even though we should step aside in respect. Because ants could be the key to fighting plant diseases and developing new antibiotics for humans.
The audience at the first edition of the Thesis Festival got a very convincing introduction to this when biologist Ida Cecilie Jensen from Aarhus University presented the content of her master’s thesis. As one of many other graduates, she took up the invitation to be a speaker at the Thesis Festival and share her expertise and experience of writing her thesis in front of a wide audience. Instead of gathering dust in a drawer, 75 master’s theses were brought to life here. You could, for example, learn about experiences in promoting the proportion of women in the music industry, how digitalisation affects the media, or what’s hiding in Ida Cecilie Jensen’s biological treasure trove.
The biologist herself describes her thesis as one of many that show that the world is full of marvellous solutions that can be used in the green transition. The Otto Mønsted Foundation attaches great value to the dissemination of science, which is why the foundation supports the Thesis Festival.
The ants are at the forefront
“Ants are very similar to humans,” explains Ida Cecilie Jensen. They have social societies and for 50 million years they have practised developing medicine to fight the diseases that affect them. They have done this with an arsenal of chemical weapons with antibiotic effects that ants both secrete themselves or distribute from other organisms and bacteria that live on the ant.
“The interesting thing about the ants’ chemical substances is that they are often very broad-spectrum, which means that they not only work against the diseases that affect the ants themselves, but also in some cases the diseases that can affect us humans and plants. This is the knowledge I have used in my thesis, where I have investigated whether ants can be used to combat plant diseases in agriculture,” says Ida Cecilie Jensen.
This involved a lot of fieldwork in an orchard, where Ida Cecilie Jensen counted leaves on 92 apple trees throughout the summer and then went into the laboratory to test the results under controlled conditions.
“The results showed that forest ants were able to reduce the incidence of the fungal disease apple scab by 41%. This means that the ants were able to inhibit or completely control this plant disease.”
What can we do with these results?
“Ants are in many ways a Swiss army knife that can fight plant diseases, but also pests. So you could firstly focus on getting ants implemented in Danish fruit farming to combat such diseases. Today, organic orchards don’t really have the means to control apple scab, so either apples with apple scab end up as must or are discarded. Our knowledge about the ants can also be used to take some of the ant’s antibiotic substances and use them to develop new bio-pesticides that can be sprayed. And thirdly, it can be used to develop new antibiotics for us humans. The latest antibiotics have been found on the surface of an African ant, so there is also huge potential in the pharmaceutical industry,” says Ida Cecilie Jensen.
She is working to further qualify all this. The young biologist is applying for funding for a PhD or alternatively to become an entrepreneur and turn her knowledge into business. Considering that 20-40% of our crops are lost due to pests and plant diseases, she believes there is something to be gained.
Facts about the Thesis Festival
Every year, around 26,000 master’s theses are produced at universities across the country, but often only an external examiner and supervisor get to see the results of the many hours of work. The Youth Bureau and Station – a Student Innovation House in Frederiksberg have therefore created the Thesis Festival, where all the knowledge produced by the country’s thesis students is heard, celebrated and recognised. The festival was held for the first time on 23-24 September 2021, where 75 graduates, among others, presented their unique, versatile thesis.