SCIENTISTS have genetically modified mice to enable them to sniff out landmines and hope they might be in use within five years.
More than 70 countries are contaminated by unexploded landmines. ''Long after wars have ended, communities are still impeded from going back to their normal, daily activities because of all these mines still affecting their land,'' said Charlotte D'Hulst of Hunter College, New York, who led the team that developed the GM mouse, known as MouSensor.
One approach to clearing landmines is to use HeroRats, giant pouched rats that are trained to sniff out landmines by the Belgian non-government organisation APOPO.
Two of these, with a human handler, can clear an area of 300 square metres in under two hours. It would take two people about two days to do the same. But the HeroRats need about nine months of training.
Dr D'Hulst wanted to improve on the HeroRats concept by creating a genetically modified ''supersniffer'' mouse, sensitive to the specific odour of the explosives in landmines, TNT.
She will present the latest results from her work this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans.
So far, the mouse has not been tested in the field.
Given its extreme sensitivity to TNT, it would probably have some sort of seizure when it sniffed explosives, Dr D'Hulst said. That seizure might be detectable by some device implanted into the mouse.
''We are thinking along the lines of implanting a chip under the skin of these animals that would wirelessly report back to a computer when the animal's behaviour is changing upon being triggered by a TNT landmine,'' she said.
Once the location had been identified, a bomb-disposal expert could go in and neutralise it in the normal way. The mouse itself would be safe from the landmine, since it would be too small to trigger an explosion.
The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross' weapon contamination unit, Ben Lark, said biosensors such as the GM mice would only be one way of detecting landmines and only in certain situations. ''You never use one means on its own,'' he said.