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Alligator Blood May Be Source of New Antibiotics
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."
I just can't shake the image of leatherhead from teenage mutant ninja turtles from my mind now. whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Were they hoping people wouldn't associate a wonderdrug from a reptile (this shite) with the common phrase "snake oil" (a wonderdrug from a reptile)
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
Let alone they eat about anything which doesn't eat them first.
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?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"Bite me."
My work here is dung.
The kid's got alligator blood. can't get rid of em...
The ability to heal quickly and fight off almost any infection would be a huge adaptation for any animal even without the territory battles. The fact that alligators are one of the few (only?) animals to evolve this adaptation indicates that it comes with a hefty price.
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.
Good for what ails ya.
'nuff said.
Finally, the Tau'ri get their own tretonin?
Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles."
By extension, this would mean that my brother and I are immune to just about everything.
Nice to see another animal joining the tiger, rhino and elephant in helping mankind survive and prosper.
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.
Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles.
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.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
just not so good for your health to try to collect it
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.
...
I'll tell you what could go wrong:
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.
I got a catholic block.
... hanging around... The kid's got alligator blood!
Ok, who thinks the Biochemists from McNeese State University have been watching a wee bit too many Sci Fi Pictures original films?
"next tonight... MANGATOR!"
[badum-ching]
A Human Right
Alligator blood? Man, that's cold.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
How long will these alligators survive, now that their blood became worthy?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
That would be Kombucha, which is much easier to obtain/use than 'gator blood.
Crocodile's Immune System Kills HIV - story from 2005
wot no sig
"Hangin around...hangin around...kid's got alligator blood"
There was very recent research that was quite extensive that showed this cost of complexity in evolution is a myth. I don't know why you think it has to come at a cost, it just so happens that alligators needed it to live in their conditions and with their temperaments.
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).
My work here is dung.
-Devin Jeanpierre
So, why don't we all have it as a regular meals? http://thimg.dreamwiz.com/upfile/200804/1207481786152_1.jpg
Just to point out, McNeese State University, where the study was done, is in Lake Charles, LA. That's in South Louisiana. Which is mostly swampland, or close to it.
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'.
If people could get their blood infused (at least temporarily) with alligator blood it may be also used during surgery on humans to decrease the chance of infection and lessen the need for blood flow. Then, if the infusion could be permanent...
- 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.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
alligators also:
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 vigilant guard at your front door who lets no one in, it is another thing to let anyone in your house who wanders by, simply offering nothing inside worth stealing
i would suspect therefore that a lot of the alligator's adaptations to remaining infection free are so very fundamentally different from our body's approach to infection as to be inapplicable to how our bodies approach the subject. they're way of life is so different and ancient as compared to ours, some of their adaptations may be inapplicable to our own bodies
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dr.Curt Connors would back it.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_(comics)/The Lizard
Something tells me we'll have to put them back on the endangered species list. We just recently took them off of it.
Turns out Komodo dragons have a fairly lethal cocktail of bacteria in their saliva.
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/
Absolute statements are never true
What's funny is that the whole concept of advantageous traits is a shifting thing. I listened to some NPR reporters asking why native trees from New York had big thorns on them. It turns out they're very similar to thorns on some trees in Africa, which evolved to minimize predation by elephants. Well, it turns out these trees from New York evolved these spikes to fend of mammoths, though it seems like a silly waste of energy now.
The trees that didn't have the spikes were all eaten. The alligators who couldn't heal quickly all died. That's evolution for ya.
Hanging around. Hanging around. Can't get rid of him. Kid's got aligator blood.
From Alfred Hitchcock's Book of Monster (IIRC)
A not insane scientist doing research on alligators or crocs discovers that they have a congenital heart condition (hole in the heart wall I think it was) that made them so sluggish. He fixes the gene, the hole is healed, and shortly afterward the story ends with humanity living underground in fear of winged fire-breathing dragons.
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Gatorade
The authors must never have heard of the innate immune system. Unlike the adaptive arm, the innate system responds very quickly to non-self and can combat infection or at least control the spread of pathogens until the adaptive system can respond effectively. Defensins and other bacteriacidal proteins are as old as insects and have been purified from haemolymph (the insect functional equivalent of blood) for almost two decades. Humans also boast a large repertoire of Toll-Like Receptors, analogues to Drosophila Toll, which recognize molecular patterns never expressed by the host, but always associated with pathogens. Another way humans respond to viruses, bacteria and fungi is the complement system, which also does not need prior exposure. This seems like grandstanding on the part of the authors, if you can even call them that, since this isn't published peer-reviewed work yet. I'll stick to eating gumbo for my alligator-derived health benefits.
Crocodiles are relatives of alligators, but are not the same animal. I know it's confusing because they're very scary animals.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I'm glad to see this. You get them for the opposite reason as a diabetic leg ulcer (instead of poor supply in - you have poor flow out). These things can take YEARS to heal (I'm going on a year)
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)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
So in this rare circumstance, the weird ritual of drinking your enemies' blood to "gain their strength" may actually do something? That is too weird to be made up!
stuff |
...what they actually found out) Abstract We are using mass spectrometry based proteomics to investigate immune related proteins of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). Alligators have an innate immune system, meaning that they require no specific exposure to an antigen to illicit an immune system response. Alligators were captured and blood was drawn from internal jugular vein. Adult alligators were injected with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to activate their immune system. Serum was collected from the whole blood by homogenizing and centrifugation followed by salt removal using 20% trichloroacetic acid. Proteins expressed after exposure to LPS was separated using 2D-gel electrophoresis. The down-regulated proteins were isolated and digested for identification. Analysis was performed using nano-ESI-MS/MS on a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer and identified with MASCOT using MSDB and NCBInr database. When uninfected alligator serum was compared to LPS exposed serum the protein expression changed, indicating that the alligators produce significant innate immunological proteins when exposed to an infection.
Maybe the kid born with the super-human immune system was ugly as sin and all the girls ignored him when it was time to make babies. The good looking guy was able to father dozens of children and keeled over at a young age due to an infected hang-nail.
You'd think a site full of supposed nerds would understand the concept instinctively.
Regarding 'superbugs'.
http://www.iitd.pan.wroc.pl/phages/phages.htmlI 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.
This is not a secret thing, so most likely all important people involved in that kind of science (MRSA infections) are aware of this kind of therapy.
Why in other countries (except Poland) is that treatment still not known and not available? Lot of people is dying due to 'superbugs'! MRSA infections alone are responsible for more deaths in the U.S. each year than AIDS!
Why not to let people to try this still EXPERIMENTAL therapy?
Maybe the health care industry got to big inertia or doesn't care or just prefer to cure people with super-expensive brand new antibiotics instead of something relatively cheap.
Is they business case more important then people health or life? They just want to make money instead of curing people?
The final conclusion is that we shouldn't expect anything spectacular regarding 'gator immune system'. Other treatments are already available but simply ignored.
They will not make it available if not sure that it will earn a mountain of bucks for them.
SHOW ME THE MONEY!
Your name is notquitecajun. I would say it describes Lake Charles.
Well Lake Charles is not really South Louisiana, but lower Texas.
I would say south louisiana are places starting with Lafayette and going to Thibodaux, Houma, LockPort, LaRose.
I was born in Houma, raised in New Orleans, and went to college in Thibodaux. I don't even rate New Orleans as South Louisiana, it is an entity unto intself.
I lived in Lake Chuck for about a year, and it definitley is more redneck than Cajun(my grandparents spoke french before english down in Gibson).
Lafayette has the Atchafalaya, Lake Charles has Moss bluff. Two very different animals.
And the reason the alligators are a nuisance is that in the real South Louisiana is that years ago when the brought in the lily pads to stop the erosion, they overgrow and choked the water, so they brought in the nutria to eat the lily pads, and the nutria bred like the rats they are, and the gators had an instant self replinishing food source. Plus with the restrictions on killing them, they are all over the place now.
Alligator is good eating though.
I am an actual coon ass!
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
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 fence lizard. An interesting side effect of this behavior is that the blood of the lizard apparently clears the ticks' guts of Lyme bacteria. So this immune adaptation is apparently present in a number of lizard species.
Think, also, of the Komodo dragon, which walks around with a poisonous soup of microbes in its mouth at all times -- in fact, it actually uses this disease cocktail as an offensive weapon.
Breakfast served all day!
So the blood of lawyers is good for something now, eh?
i'm so so sorry
really
The last alligator in the wild went extinct this spring. Enviornmentalists blame over use by humans of the highly successful drug family Alligacin. Wide spread infections have become possible, they claim, as they were adapted to alligtor immune system protiens by over use from humans wanting to use them from aliments ranging from a cut finger, to the common cold, to a stubbed toe.
""The fact that people will misuse drugs does not mean we shouldn't make them available."
...
Someone should probably tell that to the DEA before we waste any more resources on this whole war on drugs thing."
Hmm, or they have another reason entirely for cracking down on drugs?
Just speculating
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Gator blood to boost immunity
Alcohol to kill micro-organisms
Hot pepper sauce to "cleanse" the digestive tract
Sounds like we are onto something here. Don't let big pharma know.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
...for about three years.
Doctors will start prescribing this rather than regular penicillin (because drug companies love a new, expensive drug), they'll treat the most minor infection with it (it's all about the money people). Then soon, after we've all been pumped full of the stuff, the clever little bacteria will evolve, become resistant, and it'll be ineffective again.
Still, the drug companies made a quick buck, and people still want an antibiotic that works, so they go find another, and start again.
I've always said, medical care and for-profit-companies, should be kept as far away from each other as possible. Luckly I live in the UK where I can hurt myself as much as I like, and not expect a bill.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
If you believe this article, then I have some swamp-land in Florida I'd like to sell you...oh, wait...
---scott
Robocode in VB: http://scott-thomason.org/vbrobocode
Am I the only one who recalls the myth of dragon's blood being incredibly medicinal? Dragon -> Alligator Hmmmmmm...
Of course there's some super-miraculous cure-all found somewhere in the wild. The point is, as soon as you turn it into mass-produced medicine, the bugs are selected for resistance, and it doesn't work anymore. That is the whole point. Chemical medicine is useful to a degree, but it's now reached a state where people are only racing because they have legs. There's no invincible goal state that can be reached. Back off the drugs and let the human race do some evolving of its own. There are only so many last-ditch saves left in nature and if we haven't formed natural resistances by the time they run out, we're stuck in The Matrix without any Kung Fu.
I believe it should read "Previous studies have shown" rather than "showed" because it's in the past perfect tense.
I'm not sure the new show will be that successfull, but here's a possible theme song...
Gator-Man, Gator-Man,
Hides in water wherever he can,
Grabs a leg, Just like light,
Lets the corpse rot overnight,
Hey man, here comes the Gator-Man,
Gator-Man, Gator-Man, Deadly neighbourhood Gator-Man, Wealth and fame, he's ignored,
Chunks of flesh are his reward,
Hey man, here comes the Gator Man
May be that there is no "cost" to this trait. Think about it for a second in terms of the 'gators environment: Alligators and crocs make their daily living by floating in an organic-rich environment that contains innumerable bacteria, parasitic worms, amoeba, and other nasties. When they do get out of the water, it's to crawl up on a culture medium called "mud".
In an environment like this, it seems that natural selection would weed out weak immune systems post-haste and reward only the most hardy. Any skin-breaking injury in a swamp can be deadly.
Being that gators and crocs have lived in these or close to these environs for quite a while now, I would have expected at least some sort of adaption along these lines.
Now, why don't sharks get cancer?
blah
That's the first thing I thought. I thought "alligators made it for about 80 million years little changed, and now we're going to kill 'em off." We're going to steal their secret survival weapon and spray it all over the place until the pathogens are all immune, and then that'll be it for the alligators.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
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.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Apparently you don't know much of people with whom you share this planet.
:)
You and the previous answerer should take a peek at whales which are hunted 'for science' by the japanese whalers.
Or other wild animals which are hunted for various parts. I'm not as silly to eat tiger testicles as you believe i am. But there ARE other people
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
.. after my last visit to the doctor and he gave me a shot.
Save the alligators!!
HIV, or _Human_ Immunodeficiency Virus, is specific to humans only. It cannot infect non-humans, as they do not have receptors on their cells which respond to the virus.
that's easy you recruit young passionate but naive men to fight for the "good" cause and promise to take care of their family is they should die for the cause; then once you have them in a foreign land surrounded by a cadre of vicious paid thugs, you tell him you'll sell his sisters into sexual slavery and kill the rest of his family if he doesn't.
Vultures are indeed a good bet as they're able to handle eating some very scary things.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
...It looks like my ex will be good for something positive.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I was once bit by a gator. Sent me to the hospital because it got really infected (big red lines were coming up my arm, as it turns out my lymphatic system got infected with something less than friendly). I got a healthy shot of antibiotics to fix me up (along with a couple days of involuntary bed rest). Funny to see the gator's blood could be the source for the next hardcore antibiotic.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.