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South Indian Frog Oozes Molecule That Inexplicably Decimates Flu Viruses (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the flu-slashing dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: From the slimy backs of a South Indian frog comes a new way to blast influenza viruses. A compound in the frog's mucus -- long known to have germ-killing properties -- can latch onto flu virus particles and cause them to burst apart, researchers report in Immunity. The peptide is a potent and precise killer, able to demolish a whole class of flu viruses while leaving other viruses and cells unharmed. But scientists don't know exactly how it pulls off the viral eviscerations. No other antiviral peptide of its ilk seems to work the same way. The study authors, led by researchers at Emory University, note that the peptide appears uniquely nontoxic -- something that can't be said of many other frog-based compounds. Thus, the peptide on its own holds promise of being a potential therapy someday. But simply figuring out how it works could move researchers closer to a vaccine or therapy that could take out all flus, ditching the need for yearly vaccinations for each season's flavor of flu.

25 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Decimate? by Tovam · · Score: 5, Informative

    Decimate: Kill one in every ten
    That doesn't sound very useful.

    1. Re:Decimate? by rkordmaa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That sounds very useful, finding mechanism where a finely tuned molecule happens to demolish a whole class of viruses could be a discovery on the level with antibiotics.

    2. Re:Decimate? by rkordmaa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, exactly exactly my point, this kind of discovery has the potential to do the same with viruses that antibiotics did with bacterial infections.

    3. Re:Decimate? by EvilSS · · Score: 2

      From the Oxford English Dictionary

      VERB

      [WITH OBJECT]

      1 Kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of. ‘the inhabitants of the country had been decimated’

      1.1 Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something) ‘public transport has been decimated’

      2 (historical) Kill one in every ten of (a group of people, originally a mutinous Roman legion) as a punishment for the whole group. ‘the man who is to determine whether it be necessary to decimate a large body of mutineers’

      Usage

      Historically, the meaning of the word decimate is ‘kill one in every ten of (a group of people)’. This sense has been more or less totally superseded by the later, more general sense ‘kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of’, as in the virus has decimated the population. Some traditionalists argue that this is incorrect, but it is clear that it is now part of standard English

      Origin

      Late Middle English: from Latin decimat- ‘taken as a tenth’, from the verb decimare, from decimus ‘tenth’. In Middle English the term decimation denoted the levying of a tithe, and later the tax imposed by Cromwell on the Royalists (1655).

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    4. Re:Decimate? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Informative

      Which could be enough. Not to mention that decimate has gained a different meaning beyond "killing every tenth", with a more colloquial use it usually means "kills a portion of them" without going into detail how many.

      Antibiotics don't kill all bacteria either. That's why antibacterial soap, cleaning and laundry agents usually hurt more than they help, since they only kill the germs that are susceptible to antibacterial treatment, leaving the "superbugs" unharmed. Essentially what you do that way is breed them by playing natural selection, culling the weak ones to give the stronger ones more room and food to expand into.

      Why antibiotics work well in humans is that we have an immune system that doesn't care whether the bacteria are resistent to antibacterial treatment. What our immune system cares about is numbers. If too many bacteria come, it gets overwhelmed, at least for a time, and we get sick. If antibiotics kill off the majority of bacteria, the immune system can easily deal with what's left.

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    5. Re:Decimate? by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      And that meaning changed since Roman times. Actually, it gained an additional one.

      Guess what: Language develops. Let's ask someone who should know.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    6. Re:Decimate? by EvilSS · · Score: 2

      So, which of annihilate/destroy/demolish should represent every one in ten now? There is a reason why decimate means what it means...

      It means to give a tithe of 10%. At least that is the original english language usage (Glossographia, 1656, with examples in print going back to at least 1528). So why are you talking about breaking stuff?

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    7. Re:Decimate? by Chas · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's one of those terms that people who like to pretend they're well educated use.

      Unfortunately they conflate it with "devastate" (to lay waste or make desolate; ravage; destroy. to confound or overwhelm).

      The misuse has persisted so long that it's distressingly common nowadays among the Inteligencia-wannabes. A side-effect of morons who have been indoctrinated by morons indoctrinating yet another generation of morons.

      --


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      THANK GOD!!!
    8. Re:Decimate? by ravenshrike · · Score: 3, Informative

      Having RTFA, it completely destroys all H1 flu viruses. None of the other types.

    9. Re:Decimate? by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      Using soap is a good idea. Using antibacterial soap is not.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    10. Re:Decimate? by EvilSS · · Score: 2

      It's one of those terms that people who like to pretend they're well educated use.

      Unfortunately they conflate it with "devastate" (to lay waste or make desolate; ravage; destroy. to confound or overwhelm).

      The misuse has persisted so long that it's distressingly common nowadays among the Inteligencia-wannabes. A side-effect of morons who have been indoctrinated by morons indoctrinating yet another generation of morons.

      Or, you know, every dictionary and scholar on the subject. But if you are pissing and moaning about it not being used properly, then you should go look in the mirror. The original English use was for a 10% tithe, or taking a 10th. It was over 100 years (1528 to 1676) between the first known written use to refer to tithing before anyone used it to mean to "kill one in every 10". Now I'm sure you'll come back with "blah blah Romans blah blah" but they didn't speak English, they spoke Latin. And if you want to go there, well then there are a LOT of words you and everyone else are using wrong.

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    11. Re:Decimate? by sexconker · · Score: 2

      And that meaning changed since Roman times. Actually, it gained an additional one.

      Guess what: Language develops. Let's ask someone who should know.

      You're pointing to MW as an authority? The clowns who decreed that "literally" means the exact opposite of "literally"? These retards are shitting on the language. Every year they jump up and down about "new words" that some 10-14 year olds are spouting being made "official" by slapping them into their dictionary.

      Language changes, yes. Not all change is good. Any change that adds ambiguity, such as by significantly altering the meaning of an existing and used word, is in fact detrimental to the language as it makes it more difficult to use for its only purpose - communication.

  2. I have always wondered... by OpenSourced · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...how all the technical and scientific capabilities of humankind cannot develop an antibody for a particular virus, but our immune systems do it in a couple of days, no sweat. Or rather, possibly lots of sweat, but they do it. One would thing that it would be possible to replicate the process somehow.

    Note: I understand that, in the case indicated in the article, it goes beyond that, offering some kind of general-purpose antibody, probably targeting parts of the virus cover that are more hidden, and usually don't mutate. But anyway. That we cannot design that peptide, and must rely on the blind watchmaker to find it for us, is a bit baffling.
     

    --
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    1. Re:I have always wondered... by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Interesting

      proteomics is a very new field of study. It has only been very recently that we have been able to synthesize long dna and rna strands inexpensively, and even more recently that we could reliably induce quality insertion into a target organism for biosynthesis.

    2. Re:I have always wondered... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Antibodies themselves don't actually get rid of the viruses. They just serve as markers. Since different strains of viruses have different structures, they require different antibodies to be marked. The time from infection to elimination of the infection is due to the system developing the marker antibodies, dispersing them, and then hunting the offending items down via white blood cells.

      Things like this usually function on a completely different mechanism. To compare to bacteria, some antibacterials attack the cell wall of the organism in some way that normal body cells are immune to. My speculation is that this probably works in a similar fashion, decomposing proteins specific to this type of virus.

    3. Re:I have always wondered... by EvilSS · · Score: 5, Informative

      Antibodies, like all proteins, are pretty complex molecules. The binding sites in particular are very tricky. They need to be designed to bind properly to the target AND ONLY THE TARGET protein. This involves balancing physical geometry and electrical charges to match up with the target protein to get a correct fit and strong binding. This needs to happen at the atomic level, using amino acid building blocks. We don't even fully understand how our bodies do it yet. Think of it this way: we are still working towards building our first commercial, very basic nano machines. Our bodies (and all life for that matter) are filled with them. These machines, such as enzymes, are capable of doing amazing things, like building and re-arranging molecules at the atomic level. Each one customized to do a very specific task. We can hijack biology and genetics to make some of the things we want but as far as our technology goes, we are way, way behind nature.

      Right now our best option is to identify existing antibodies and isolate the genetic material the organism used to create it and using that to create GMOs to reproduce it.

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    4. Re:I have always wondered... by Narcocide · · Score: 2

      This doesn't seem to be like antibodies though. It seems to be something non-toxic that the viruses are somehow terminally addicted to. They just suck it in until they explode. This doesn't seem to be an approach anyone had thought of before.

    5. Re:I have always wondered... by ByteSlicer · · Score: 2

      It seems to be something non-toxic that the viruses are somehow terminally addicted to. They just suck it in until they explode.

      Nope. Viruses don't have a metabolism outside of the host cell DNA/RNA. So they don't "suck", and there is no space inside the capsid (outside shell) to "suck" anything in to. From the article:

      "The researchers aren't sure why, but they hypothesize that after urumin binds HA, it exerts electrostatic forces on the surface of the particle that cause the whole shell to rupture."

      So the protein acts on the outside. The binding process is relatively passive, meaning the proteins just randomly move around until they bump into an HA stalk, and electrostatic charges make them stick.
      Most antibodies stick the same way, but on the HA heads instead of the HA stalks. They also prevent the virus to invade a host cell by disabling the HA surface protein, but since the HA heads evolve very rapidly, it only takes one virus to escape and generate a new generation that won't bind to the antibody. The stalks evolve extremely slowly, so the new protein will keep its effectiveness over many generations of the virus.

    6. Re:I have always wondered... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      ...how all the technical and scientific capabilities of humankind cannot develop an antibody for a particular virus, but our immune systems do it in a couple of days, no sweat. Or rather, possibly lots of sweat, but they do it. One would thing that it would be possible to replicate the process somehow.

      Yes, it's called Phage therapy. As compared to typical drug therapy, it is more effective, but takes somewhere between significantly and prohibitively more effort.

      --
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  3. Biodiversity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    See, politicians, conserving biodiversity is not just hippy-happy-pro-Western-and-gay-culture-talk, potentially leading to the evils of godless democracy and missing the key authority figure of you.

    1. Re:Biodiversity by GameboyRMH · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Came here to say this. Everyone who wants to build a Blade Runner environment for the glory of capitalism, take note.

      --
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  4. Re:Kills viruses? by Opportunist · · Score: 2

    Just tell the people they're washing themselves with toad snot and it should be DOA.

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  5. This may seem off topic, by jenningsthecat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but this sounds to me like an additional call to, as a species, get our environmental practices under control and stop 'instinctifying' flora and fauna at a breakneck pace. With findings like this, I have to wonder how many illness-treating, disease-defeating compounds we may have sent into oblivion by killing off the plants, animals, and insects which produced them.

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  6. Big Pharma... by Poingggg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And Big Pharma will have this patented (to never be seen again) in 3..2..1...

    Anything that can really heal any illness is not profitable, it kills its own market. It's much more profitable to make products that fight symptoms of diseases, and preferably have some side effects of their own for which other stuff can be sold.
    Don't ever think Big Pharma wants you to be(come) healthy!

    --
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    1. Re:Big Pharma... by Gilgaron · · Score: 2

      An antiviral like this would be more profitable than vaccines that you only need once per strain. This would be more like buying Round Up For Flu than a lifetime protection vaccine. So, this actually has a chance of moving forward without government money. It's the vaccines that are DOA without government backing.