Cockroach Brains May Hold New Antibiotics?

Cockroach Brains May Hold New Antibiotics?
2010 09 16

By Christine Dell’Amore | NationalGeographic.com

Cockroaches may make your skin crawl, but the insects—or, to be exact, their brains—could one day save your life.

That’s because the central nervous systems of American cockroaches produce natural antibiotics that can kill off bacteria often deadly to humans, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and toxic strains of Escherichia coli, scientists said this week.

Two species of locust tested so far also have the same bacteria-killing molecules in their tiny heads.

The findings suggest that the insect world—which makes up 80 percent of all animals on Earth—may be teeming with new antibiotics, said study co-author Simon Lee of the University of Nottingham in the U.K.

Such a discovery is crucial, because scientists are scrambling to combat strains of several infectious diseases, including MRSA and E. coli, that are resistant to traditional antibiotics, Lee said.

"It’s a promising new lead. We are looking in an unusual place, and to my knowledge no one else is looking there," Lee said.

"That’s what we need in terms of [finding new] antibiotics, because all the usual places"—such as soil microbes, fungi, and purely synthetic molecules—"have been exhausted."

Insect Brains Have "Clever Defense" Against Bacteria

Lee and colleagues dissected the tissues and brains of cockroaches—which "smell as bad as they look," Lee said—and locusts in the lab.

The team tested nine separate types of antibacterial molecules found in the insects’ brains and discovered that each molecule is specialized to kill a different type of bacteria.

This "very clever defense mechanism" allows the bugs to survive in the most dirty of domains, Lee said.

The scientists found the bugs had antibiotics only in their brain tissue, the most essential part of the body, he added.

A bug might live with an infected leg, for instance, but a brain infection would almost certainly be fatal.

Insect-brain drugs for humans are still years away, Lee said, but there’s one hopeful glimmer: When the team added the insect antibiotics to human cells in the lab, there were no toxic effects.

Preliminary findings on antibiotics in bug brains were presented at the Society for General Microbiology meeting held this week at the University of Nottingham.

Article from: news.nationalgeographic.com

Share |

Latest News from our Front Page

Mystery of Moon’s Magnetic Field Deepens
2013 05 21
The moon generated a surprisingly intense magnetic field until at least 3.56 billion years ago, 160 million years longer than previously thought, a new study reports. These findings could shed light not just on the magnetic field of the moon, which is now extremely weak, but on that of asteroids and other distant worlds, investigators added. Earth’s magnetic field is created by ...

New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More
2013 05 21
New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft [MSFT -0.07%] programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe ...

PANOPTICON: The documentary about your privacy
2013 05 21
Control on our daily lives increases and privacy is disappearing. How is this exactly happening and in which way will it effect all our lives? A film about the rise of the surveillance state into your life.

U.S. Dept of Defense googling ’Bishop Richard Williamson Boston Bombings’
2013 05 21
What does the average American imagine that the "U.S. Department of Defense" does doing their workday? Protect the nation? Conduct military exercises? Invade and subjugate foreign nations who refuse to bow to the international bankers? Perhaps. They are, however, also surfing the internet to snoop on Catholic Bishops who don’t tow the party line. On May 20th, the U.S. Department ...

No Bank Deposits Will Be Spared from Confiscation
2013 05 18
As alert Zero Hedge readers are aware, this week the EURO Politburo is busy debating the dodgy subject of deposit "bail-ins." The following article very succinctly explains this odious mode of fractal fractional reserve end-game chicanery. The author encourages all of you to share it with others. NO BANK DEPOSITS WILL BE SPARED FROM CONFISCATION By Matthias Chang Esq, futurefastforward.com (with author’s permission) I challenge ...

More News »