Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) play an important role in the pharmacological and food industry due to their therapeutic and nutritional properties. Being the most abundant eusocial insects in the world, ants also serve as a repository of bioactive compounds, which are utilized for their ecological interactions and defense. Ants have been used for the treatment of various diseases including asthma, cancer, arthritis, and other microbial infections in both modern and ethnic medicine. This is attributed to various compounds, such as antimicrobial peptides, biogenic amines, alkaloids, and flavonoids obtained from ant venom as well as whole‐body extracts. However, most of these compounds have not been characterized till date. Ant endosymbionts are also known to contribute to some of these properties and to play a crucial role in digestion, protection from enemies, nutritional upgrading, nitrogen recycling, and reproductive manipulation of their host. Hence, they have been used in pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetic industries due to their ability to produce various bioactive compounds. In contrast, ectosymbionts specifically help in pathogen defense. However, the potential of ant symbionts in the welfare and production of therapeutic compounds is not extensively studied. This review mainly focuses on the role of ants and their symbiotic microbes as a potential source of bioactive compounds in therapeutic interventions for exploring future possibilities in drug development research.

Stylotermitidae appear peculiar among all termites, feeding in trunks of living trees in South Asia only. The difficulty to collect them limits our ability to study them, and they thus still belong to critically unknown groups in respect to their biology. We used a combined approach of microscopic observations, chemical analysis and behavioural tests, to understand the source and chemical nature of the trail-following pheromone of Stylotermes faveolus from India and S. halumicus from Taiwan. The sternal gland is the exclusive source of the trail-following pheromone in both Stylotermes species. It is located at the 5th abdominal sternite in workers, made of class I, II and III secretory cells. Gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry showed a minor peak corresponding to (Z)-dodec-3-en-1-ol (DOE). This compound elicits strong behavioural responses in workers, with a trail-following activity threshold around 10− 4 ng/cm in both species. Based on both chemical analysis and behavioural experiments, we estimated the amount of DOE around 0.1 ng/gland in S. faveolus and we conclude that DOE is the only active component of the trail-following pheromone of both Stylotermes species, like in all Kalotermitidae studied so far. Our results confirm the switch from complex aldehyde trail-following pheromones occurring in the basal groups to simpler linear alcohols in the ancestor of Kalotermitidae and Neoisoptera.

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