Alligator Blood May Be Source of New Antibiotics 265
esocid writes "Biochemists from McNeese State University have described how proteins in gator blood may provide a source of powerful new antibiotics to help fight infections associated with diabetic ulcers and severe burns. This new class of drug could also crack so-called 'superbugs' that are resistant to conventional medication. Previous studies have showed alligators have an unusually strong immune system; unlike humans, alligator immune systems can defend against microorganisms such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria without having prior exposure to them. Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles."
Cue TMNTs (Score:4, Funny)
In that vein (Score:4, Funny)
evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing
An angry Wolverine, the four horseman Wolverine to be exact, sues for prior art, and on a technicality gains control of the entire human population's genome. This would quite literally usher in "the" Apocolypse.
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Re:Cue TMNTs (Score:4, Insightful)
Like this couple [groundreport.com] for example. I'm sure there are hundreds of other similar cases you can find with little effort.
The joke about a doctor asking their patient if they believe in ID or evolution determining whether they get a flu shot is very appropriate in this situation.
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Re:Cue TMNTs (Score:5, Interesting)
Most opiate analgesics and anaesthetics are, for example, prohibited under the intoxication rule (the one that prohibits alcohol), but are allowed in medical situations. Same for alcohol used in field treatment of hypothermia and other emergency situations.
I'm not sure about the Kosher rules in Judaism, but in Islam, any substance of medicinal value is permitted if necessary for the health of the patient.
This rule is conscience based I guess, for all of you thinking of that Simpsons episode where the blind guy was smoking weed for "medicinal purposes".
Re:Cue TMNTs (Score:5, Interesting)
It may be helpful to add that Orthadox Jews traditionally keep kosher on a voluntary, not compulsory, basis. That is, the rules are followed in order to honor god, not because there is some terrible consequence or threat involved if they do not do so. It is not a "keep kosher or go to hell" kind of thing. It is more like "God asks that we keep kosher. We love and honor god, so we will therefore, as a practice of worship and respect, keep kosher as god requests."
Re:Cue TMNTs (Score:4, Informative)
Is this a joke? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe because you have read about it before: (Score:5, Informative)
Hi. Maybe you're unaware (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe because you have read about it before: (Score:5, Informative)
superbugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:superbugs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:superbugs (Score:4, Funny)
[runs from moderators with anti-meme missiles]
Re:superbugs (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone every looked into vultures - after all, they eat dead carcasses, they must be exposed to quite astounding levels of bugs.
Not to mention other things that eat dead bodies - ants, for example.
And what about vampires
Re:superbugs (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that people will misuse drugs does not mean we shouldn't make them available. If you read TFA you'll see:
I'd say the possible faster introduction of superbugs may be worth the risk if we can at least try.
Re:superbugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone should probably tell that to the DEA before we waste any more resources on this whole war on drugs thing.
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I meant medical drugs...though I do agree with the sentiment and making certain drugs illegal causes more net harm than net good. Different discussion entirely, though.
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Re:superbugs (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course, getting half decent anti-histamine tablets is a problem now because someone might make crystal meth out of them. When perfectly legitimate drugs start to disappear because someone might mis-use them, everyone but the DEA loses.
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Re:superbugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans need newer antibiotics because we wasted them growing pigs and chickens, and reducing the puss in milk from overproducing cows. Also, even if this 'cures' HIV the benefit is not so much in saving lives but more in protecting a social order that allows it to spread.
This will certainly result in a sad reflection on our society, that we would contribute to the destruction of animals that have been around for hundreds of millions of years. So we can have our pork sandwich for lunch for $0.50 less. But hey since we're giving a collective 'fuck you' to the world anyway, why not?
Re:superbugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoa, man. We're talking proteins in the blood...after the initial research it will probably be more practical to produce them synthetically.
I take it you're not a fan of medical research as it runs opposed to the natural order of things. But if we are in relative control of our own evolution at the moment, why should we allow our species to disappear? If the whole point of life is to propagate, and we have mechanisms in place to accomplish this basic task better, wouldn't it be against nature to do the opposite?
I find your comment interesting for another reason: you typed your comment on a computer, right? One of the byproducts of modern eco-destructive society? And you likely live in a modern house, use electricity, eat those "pork sandwiches", and probably have benefited from past medical research. The hypocrisy is stunning.
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What's also obvious is that a bacteria that can invade a single alligator does not get much benefit in terms of survival of those genes that enable it to. But when the antibiotic is found literally everywhere in the ecosystem, like our current antibiotics are, then having a gene that enables it to survive the antibiotic is a huge benefit for its survival. Thu
Re:superbugs (Score:5, Funny)
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How about scientists do their job and stay ahead of the diseases, rather than asking me to GET SICK NOW just to give them more time to find new cures?
Why the hell should I take one for THIS team?
Phage therapy for superbugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Regarding 'superbugs'.
I know that it's already possible to cure that type of infections with bacteriophages with success rate above 80% (about 95% for Staphylococcus aureus). Since last 27 years Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of Polish Academy of Sciences (located in Wroclaw) have been involved in curing about 1500 people with suppurative bacterial infections, in which a routine antibiotic therapy failed.
http://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/phages/phages.html [pan.wroc.pl]
This is not a secret thing, so mos
Have you seen where these things live? (Score:4, Insightful)
My only concern with this type of approach is how hamstrung will we get when the first protesters arrive? Can we replicate it or at least identify WHY it is so useful or different?
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Re:Have you seen where these things live? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many would, but if you try to take them up on that, a whole other group of activists gets involved preventing that testing too.
So, you think "Ok, I just won't test my product then", and a third group of activists pounces on you. There's just no way to get ahead without paying everyone off to make them happy and quiet.
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Especially since most of them are hypocrites.
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Re:Have you seen where these things live? (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly somewhat, but not as much as if the protesters hadn't been there all along to make sure the species did not become extinct, or too rare to study.
You're probably too young to remember this, but alligator skin used to be quite stylish for handbags, shoes, wallets and the like. Wild populations can provide a sustainable source of goods like this so long as people don't take so many animals that the equilibrium breaks down and the population crashes. However, that's pretty much the inevitable course of events ever since society reached a sufficient technological level to respond to market opportunities with tools that make resource extraction orders of magnitude faster (and thus more profitable).
You, as an alligator hunter, may be smart enough to know you'll make more in the long run by sustainable harvesting, but if your competition is sufficiently inbred, this sounds like hifalutin nonsense to them. When the idiots are making more money than the smart people, the near-idiots emulate the idiots, and pretty soon the people acting intelligently are the only ones who aren't in on the bonanza. At that point the intelligent choice is to act stupidly, because you maximize your long term return by grabbing a share of the breeding stock before even that is liquidated.
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Farming was only economically possible after the population was sufficiently recovered that it was no longer in danger. The reason is that you can't un-ban products made from an endangered species until that species is either out of danger, or there is no credible prospect of stabilizing the wild population and controlling poaching.
Farming isn't easy. I don't know any alligator farmers, but I do know peopl
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No worries. The biochemists studying this work at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and McNeese State University in Lake Charles, both in Louisiana. If you ever been to that part of the south, you'd know they'd rather eat the things only slightly more than they'd prefer shoot them, or use them to make handbags, belts and shoes.
Can we replicate it or at least identify WHY it is so useful or di
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"A single horseshoe crab can be worth $2,500 over its lifetime for periodic blood extractions..."
If alligator blood is important enough then we could occasionally draw from specimens which are already in captivity.
And for those of you who are mak
Re:Have you seen where these things live? (Score:5, Informative)
Their legs can be treated like Buffalo Wings, very tasty.
The tail is the most popular part, as thats used much like chicken tenders. Most people enjoy fried gator tail. You can go back further up on its back, for the tenderloin, but not as good.
Last part I've tried is the ribs. Very similar to baby back ribs, its a white meat, no question about it when eating the ribs. Yes, the amount of meat to bone isn't all that good, but its good enough to enjoy a slow smoking.
Alligator really is the other other white meat, and one of my favourites.
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I can imagine two gators (on gator-dot?) having the same discussion about _us_.
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If it wasn't for their wolverine-esque regenerative powers their blood would instantly dissolve their own selves, like so much molecular acid.
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Hillbilly Research (Score:5, Funny)
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What's the cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, can we leverage this adaptation for ourselves without incurring the price? If the price is energy expended to produce the ultra efficient immune system, that's fine; but if the price is directly tied to the effects themselves this may prove worthless.
Re:What's the cost? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's the cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
To say that there must be some tradeoff implies that evolution's purpose is to produce the most perfectly adapted organism possible, when in fact evolution has no purpose at all. It is a series of mutations that tend to produce organisms that are well adapted, but certainly not perfectly adapted in most cases, to the particular environment they find themselves in.
Or, it might turn out that the tradeoff is that you end up growing tough scaly skin that people like to make into boots and handbags, in which case I look forward to giving my wife a Gucci Human-skin bag in the near future.
Not the only species (Score:3, Informative)
The alligator does not seem to be entirely unique in this.
In my Emerging Infectious Diseases class, we learned that the tiny ticks that spread the Lyme disease bacterium are known to bite and feed on the blood of the western
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Can you think of any other adaptation that is as advantagous as this one (immunity from virtually all kinds of disease and infection) that isn't shared by a wide variety
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Some other unique and inexplicably rare adaptations include the pinniped's ability to sleep a hemisphere at a time, the termite's ability to eat wood, and parthenogenesis.
Cost of Complexity is a Myth (Score:5, Insightful)
You can sit here all day and question why we don't have some of the obvious advantage traits that any other animal has and the answer is simple: we didn't require it. If humans needed it and didn't have it, we wouldn't be around.
Explain your logic on why this must come at a price? The random evolution happened in alligators and may be present in other animals (or extinct relatives).
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Don't believe that this adaptation is that advantagious? Infections deseases are responsible for 20% of human deaths, second only to heart disease; and that is even with modern antibiotics.
Re:Cost of Complexity is a Myth (Score:4, Insightful)
Evolution is about offspring (Score:3, Funny)
You'd think a site full of supposed nerds would understand the concept instinctively.
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Evolution is not random. Mutation is but evolution isn't.
Don't fall into the ID trap
On advantageous traits (Score:3, Interesting)
The trees that didn't have the spikes were all eaten. The alligators who
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Consider two bacteria. One has the minimal DNA needed to survive, while the other carries a huge extra section giving it the ability to digest aspartame, vinyl, and old magazines.
They are living in a nice sugar solution, so they can divide and replicate as fast as they want to.
The bacterium with the shorter DNA replicates faster. It outcompetes the bacterium with the extra DNA, and in 50 generations it represents 99.999% of the population.
When the environment
There may be no cost (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no such indication. There may be a cost, but that's not indicated by the evidence. It may just be that most/all other animals didn't have the specific circumstances that would start a chain of mutations leading to this. It could simply be that alligators are far more likely to get injured, and therefore when this mutation occurred, it much more likely to survive than it
Re:What's the cost? (Score:4, Funny)
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Gator-aid? (Score:5, Funny)
'nuff said.
zzz (Score:2)
Still, I'm sure as a sensible and mature species we can do the right thing and coexist happy with our newfound antibiotic donors. It would be ironic if after they finally disappear from the wild (and they are one of those species that has been around for many many millions of years) they survive only in medicine farms.
sigh.
Re:zzz (Score:5, Interesting)
There are already decent protections for legal hunting gator, and this may increase the pressure against poaching.
Why evolution? (Score:2, Informative)
Or conversely, alligators as a species have always had these antibiotics. Why is it that every interesting or perplexing feature about a species must be somehow attributed to, or be a product of, evolution?
I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution.
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The article isn't saying that they just recently evolved this immune system if that's what you are trying to say. Mearly that we have discovered this new adap
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Okay, then their most recent ancestors evolved it.
Either you think that all species got their present form due to natural selection, or you don't. You can't say "Weeeelllll, sure, some did, but this particular species probably just sprang up fully-formed out of the ether."
Well, okay, you can say that, but don't expect scientists to agree.
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I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution.
I believe the real root of your concern, which I share to some degree, is that oftentimes people will be quick to graft on an explanation based on evolutionary theory to any peculiar feature of an organism, without any testing. Thus, one could conceivably concoct several different interpretations based on evolutionary theory of the origins of any feature of an organism.
However, and this is the key point, just because one can come up with an arbitrary interpretation, does not mean that an explanation groun
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> I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution.
Because every interesting, perlexing, or boring feature of a species is of course a product of evolution.
The first single cell didn't have a powerful immune syst
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An advanced immune system or rapid regen
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Probably because everything that exists today was influenced by everything that took place in the past. Some traits are probably just random mutations that neither increased nor decreased the chances for survival - human handedness, hair/eye color, ear shape... these have few impacts on survival save some extreme conditions. Until science can come up with a good reason why most of us are right handed, I doubt one could really call it evolution, rather random mutation.
No, its still evolution. Even if we don't know the utility of something, that is no reason to believe that its not the product of evolution. For example, quite recently we discovered the reason why we have an appendix (other than to make my life as an ER doctor a living hell.) However 5 years ago, if you asked any evolutionary biologist they would have still said that the appendix is a product of evolution. It would be like suggesting that gravity wasn't really there until Newton described it.
Of course
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It's not so much a matter of belief but utility. This is how you use a scientific theory like evolution.
Evolution is such an important biological concept, that every well designed study which either relates to breeding populations of organisms or to traits which might promote the survival of individuals within such a population sets out to disprove natural selection. It's
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What I was trying to say is that it's possible that the alligator had always had these antibiotics since it's initial state of being, and that it didn't obtain these antibiotics somewhere along its course of life.
To repeat: everything about alligators is a product of evolution, but it's entirely plausible t
I guess what's old is new again. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I guess what's old is new again. (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/680840.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Adam Britton
oh yeah, it's great for you (Score:2, Funny)
Strong immune system vs evolution rate (Score:5, Interesting)
Gators/Crocs are famous for having not changed much since the time of the dinosaurs.
I wonder if since they have a very strong immune system that kills viruses etc so well, if they have not denied themselves the opportunity to incorporate useful viral dna and bacterial plasmids into their own dna. It would be interesting to see if they have a different amount of viral origin genes in their genomes than other animals.
Re:Strong immune system vs evolution rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we should start looking at other dinosaur-era lifeforms and seeing what's in their immune system.
Hanging around ... (Score:2)
Skiffy (Score:2)
"next tonight... MANGATOR!"
[badum-ching]
Alligator blood? (Score:5, Funny)
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evolution goes wrong (Score:2)
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Oh man, you've made my day. I thought I saw dumb replies but this got to top the rest of the ignorance. What do you think they researchers will do?? Grab them all and drain them of blood??
Here's what will happen,
1. they go to a zoo or similar controller place and get some blood samples. Or grab a few specimens for their own little "zoo"
2. work on the blood samples for weeks/months
3. go back to step #1 for as long as necessary for #4 to be available
4. get some result
This i
In LOUISIANA... (Score:3, Funny)
Those kids KNOWS gators. Which are tasty, by the way, and becoming a borderline nuisance down in South LA because the @#$%ing damnyankee tourists keep feedin' em and dey come up to de pirogue lookin' for de crap-touristee food and you gotta whack 'em wit' de paddle and dey bite de paddle and you got...woah, sorry.
All that goes to say....Gator sausage is GOOD eatin'.
The Cajun Cure (Score:3, Funny)
- 2 oz. fresh gator blood
- 2 oz. rum 151 proof or stronger
- splash hot pepper sauce
- serve straight up with or without raw egg
Cures what ails you.Re: (Score:2)
Pfff. Lightweight.
And let me NARROW that down for you. Tobasco, Krystal, or Louisiana Hot Sauce. Or choose your local south LA brand or whatever you made up yourself.
their system may be too different (Score:2, Interesting)
1. eat putrid rotten food
2. live in oxygen deprived standing water
3. have been doing so for hundreds of millions of years
therefore, their immune systems should be absolutely spectacular
however, some of their adaptations might be more systematic. that is, rather than fight off infecting agents, they may simply let infectious agents traverse their organ systems with impunity, without any resistance, and also without offering any safe harbor. in other words, it is one thing to have a fanatical
Endangered species (Score:2)
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Komodo dragons too (Score:2, Informative)
Kills prey that manages to escape their immediate grasp, then they use smell to track it down.
Naturally they need protection from this goo too.
Couldn't find a better link than this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12238371/ [nih.gov]
As someone with a Veinious Leg Ulcer (Score:2)
I managed to catch an antibiotic resistant strain of something. Taking dyvox right now - Not fun at all, but it seems to have cleared the infection - I'll be done with this course on Friday night. Can't wait (there are a number of side effects, and a HUGE number of eating restrictions)
Drinking blood may actually help? (Score:2)
The Mad Fools! (Score:3, Funny)
Those fools!
It's true Dr. Connors' work has not yet been featured in a Spider-Man movie, but that's no excuse for scientists not being familiar with the literature regarding this kind of research.
Finally... (Score:4, Funny)