It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
North East experts chosen to work with Arctic communities on new climate change technology
IMAGE: PROFESSOR MIKE LIM UNDERTAKING RESEARCH IN CANADA’S INUIT NUNANGAT.view more
CREDIT: IMAGE CREDIT WERONIKA MURRAY
Northumbria University researchers are part of a unique team working on a new £1m project to better equip Indigenous communities in the Arctic against the disproportionate impacts of climate change.
The study, involving local community researchers and action groups, government agencies and decision-makers, Inuit knowledge-holders, and leading UK and Canadian academics, will investigate changing ground conditions and assess their wider implications in coastal regions of Canada’s Inuit homeland that are under threat from thawing permafrost, disappearing sea ice and high rates of erosion.
Nearly a third of Canada’s landmass and 50 per cent of its coastline is within the area of Inuit Nunangat, home to approximately 65,000 Inuit people. The researchers will work with affected local communities to co-develop appropriate new tools and solutions to the landscape changes that threaten critical infrastructure, navigation routes, food and water security, and impact physical and mental health and wellbeing. Some areas are under such threat that they may be lost in as little as 20 years.
Professor Mike Lim, who will lead the project alongside Tuktoyaktuk Community Senior Administrative Officer Shawn Stuckey, explained: “Coastal communities have demonstrated exceptional resilience to the challenges of Arctic living but are having to make increasingly difficult decisions over how to respond to the complex nature of more intense and disruptive environmental changes.
“Through Nuna we’ll combine a wealth of existing data and Indigenous knowledge with exciting technological developments, empowering communities to better identify and avoid emerging hazards related to the rapidly changing landscape.”
Changes to the Arctic environment are occurring faster than elsewhere on the planet and leading to many varied and interconnected impacts. Project Nuna will provide new data on when relocation will be needed in critical areas, develop early warning for ground subsidence, issue clear guidance on harmful dust exposure levels, and water-based threats such as driftwood or contaminants released during storms will also be addressed through new accessible community monitoring and citizen science data.
Professor Christopher Smith, UKRI International Champion and Executive Chair at the Arts and Humanities Research Council said: “The need to understand and respond to the deep and interlinked impacts of climate change in the Arctic has never been greater.
“We recognise and embrace the value and importance of doing so in genuine and mutually respectful and empowering partnership with Inuit researchers and communities. I look forward to seeing how the projects develop over the next three years and hearing the results of both their work and their partnerships.”
Chief Scientist of Québec, Rémi Quirion, added: “More than ever, the climate crisis demands strong and immediate action from all levels of decision-making and sectors of civil society. The scientific community is no exception. It must join forces to develop innovative, sustainable, and socially acceptable solutions to reduce the environmental impacts of climate changes.
“The 13 research projects co-developed by scientists and Inuit community representatives will have very concrete impacts and sow the seeds of hope that it is possible to change the course of things.”
The study is just one example of Northumbria University’s world-leading environmental research into extreme, cold and palaeo environments. The University is ranked second in the UK for its research power in Geography and Environmental Studies and is top 25 in Engineering in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, with 90 per cent of its research in these disciplines rated as being either world-leading or internationally excellent.
Find out more about some of the world-leading research Northumbria University is undertaking in all aspects of climate change.
CAPTION
Professor Mike Lim undertaking research in Canada’s Inuit Nunangat
CREDIT
Image credit: Weronika Murray
CAPTION
Professor Mike Lim undertaking research in Canada’s Inuit Nunangat.
CREDIT
Image credit Weronika Murray
Towards having your privacy, security and exchanging crypto too
New paper outlines better privacy and security protections when swapping cryptocurrencies
Privacy and security and control of those things are paramount in the world of cryptocurrencies.
“The whole cryptocurrency decentralized business is about giving control of the digital coins to you,” says Aravinda Thyagarajan, a postdoctoral researcher in the computer science department advised by CyLab’s Elaine Shi. “You should control your coins, and you don’t want to leak any information about them.”
This week, Thyagarajan will be presenting a new paper outlining a new protocol towards better privacy and security protections when swapping cryptocurrencies. The paper, “Universal Atomic Swaps: Secure Exchange of Coins Across All Blockchains,” is being presented at the 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Right now, if two people or entities want to swap one cryptocurrency for another—say, 1 Bitcoin for 1 Ethereum—they can swap directly between themselves, but there’s always a chance one of the two parties will be dishonest and not hold up their end of the deal. Another option, then, is to have a third-party exchange service mediate the deal. But what if the exchange service is an adversary and steals both parties’ coins?
“In the wild west of cryptocurrency, no one should be trusted,” says Thyagarajan.
There’s also an issue of privacy. If an e-commerce website only accepts one specific cryptocurrency, and you only have coins in a different cryptocurrency, you must perform an exchange into the compatible currency before purchasing from the website. That exchange can reveal sensitive information.
“You lose a bit of your privacy,” says Thyagarajan. “Using sophisticated mechanisms, people can learn to some probability information about your assets.”
Thyagarajan’s paper outlines a protocol that addresses these security and privacy concerns. First, the protocol is universal—it allows for exchanges across all current and future cryptocurrencies. Second, the swap protocol ensures that the swap will happen honestly or it won’t happen at all, meaning no one will maliciously lose coins, without relying on third parties. And lastly, the protocol supports the exchange of multiple types of coins—e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, etc.—in a single swap.
“With this protocol, you can shop on that e-commerce website using a coin that is not the coin that they accept, and keep your privacy,” says Thyagarajan. “You're able to do that because you're not relying on third-party services, and also because it doesn't rely on any special features of the underlying currency.”
All of this requires an enormous amount of computing power, Thyagarajan says, so one currently can’t do this on a laptop or phone, presenting an opportunity for future work. However, for major currencies currently, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc., Thyagarajan’s paper presents an efficient solution for the exchange that can be run now even on low-end devices.
IMAGE: ON THE LEFT: POPLAR SPROUTS CONTAINING CRSPR-EDITED GENE. ON THE RIGHT, POPLAR SPROUTS WITH THE SAME CRSPR EDIT PLUS GENE ENHANCEMENTS TO IMPROVE GROWTHview more
CREDIT: UMD
Ten years ago, a new technology called CRISPR-CAS9, made it possible for scientists to change the genetic code of living organisms. As revolutionary as it was, the tool had its limitations. Like the first cell phones that could only perform one function, the original CRISPR method can perform one function: removing or replacing genes in a genetic sequence. Later iterations of CRISPR were developed for another function that allowed scientists to change gene expression by turning them on or off, without removing them from the genome. But each of these functions could only be performed independently in plants.
Now, scientists from the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, have developed CRISPR-Combo, a method to edit multiple genes in plants while simultaneously changing the expression of other genes. This new tool will enable genetic engineering combinations that work together to boost functionality and improve breeding of new crops.
“The possibilities are really limitless in terms of the traits that can be combined,” said Yiping Qi, an associate professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture and co-author of the study. “But what is really exciting is that CRISPR-Combo introduces a level of sophistication to genetic engineering in plants that we haven’t had before.”
The new research appears in the May, 2022, issue of the journal Nature Plants.
The benefits of manipulating more than one gene at a time can far outweigh the benefits of any one manipulation on its own. For example, imagine a blight raging through wheat fields, threatening farmer livelihoods and food security. If scientists could remove a gene from the wheat that makes it susceptible to the blight and simultaneously turn on genes that shorten the plant’s life cycle and increase seed production, they could rapidly produce blight-resistant wheat before the disease had the chance to do too much damage.
That’s the type of engineering Qi and his team demonstrated in four different phases of experimentation.
Step One: proving the concept:
Qi and his team had previously developed new CRISPR methods to regulate gene expression in plants, and to edit multiple genes at the same time. But to develop CRISPR-Combo, they had to establish that they could perform both of those genetic engineering functions in parallel without negative consequences. In this new paper, they demonstrated that using tomato and rice cells,.
“As a proof of concept, we showed that we could knock out gene A and upregulate, or activate, gene B successfully, without accidentally crossing over and knocking out gene B or upregulating Gene A,” Qi said.
Then Qi and his colleagues tested CRISPR-Combo on a flowering plant called rockcress (ArabidopsisI), which is often used by researchers as a model for staple crops like corn and wheat. The researchers edited a gene that makes the plant more resistant to herbicides while activating a gene that causes early flowering, which produces seeds more quickly. The result was an herbicide-resistant rockcress plant that yielded eight generations in one year rather than the ordinary four.
More Efficient Engineering
For their third experiment, the team demonstrated how CRISPR-Combo could improve efficiency in plant breeding using tissue cultures from poplar trees. Breeding programs to develop new varieties of plants generally use tissue cultures rather than seeds—consider how a plant can regrow roots and leaves from a single stalk planted in the soil. Scientists genetically modify stem cells that have the ability to grow into full plants, and when those plants mature and produce seeds, the seeds will carry on the genetic modifications made to the stem cells.
Some plants are better at regenerating from tissue cultures than others, which makes this step the single largest bottleneck in genetic engineering of crops. For some plants the success rate is just 1%.
Qi and his team addressed the bottleneck by first editing a few traits in poplar cells, then activating three genes that promote plant tissue regeneration.
“We showed in poplars that our new method could offer a solution to the tissue regeneration bottleneck, dramatically increasing the efficiency of genetic engineering,” Qi said.
Hormone-Free Short Cut
Currently, growing genetically engineered plants from tissue cultures requires the addition of growth hormones, which activate growth promoting genes. The research team shortcut this process in rice by directly activating these genes with CRISPR-Combo. The result was gene-edited rice from tissue cultures that did not require hormone supplementation. Qi and his colleagues found that tissue cultures grown with their method expressed more of the edited gene than tissue grown using hormones.
“This method results in a highly efficient genome editing process,” Qi said.
Now that the team has demonstrated their CRISPR-Combo method works in a variety of plants for multiple purposes, they intend to conduct experiments in citrus, carrots and potatoes to test its viability in a fruit, vegetable and staple crop. They are also working to create an herbicide resistant golden rice with enhanced nutritional content and red rice with increased antioxidants.
Other co-authors on the research paper from UMD include Associate Professor Gary Coleman, post-doctoral associates Changtian Pan and Gen Li, Post-doctoral scholar Filiz Gurel, graduate students Yanhao Cheng, Aimee A. Malzahn and Simon Sretenovic, Laboratory trainee and high school student Benjamin Leyson.
This work was supported by NSF Plant Genome Research Program (award nos. IOS-1758745 and IOS-2029889), the USDA-NIFA (award nos. 2020-33522-32274 and 2019-67013-29197), the USDA-AFRI Agricultural Innovations Through Gene Editing Program (award no. 2021-67013-34554), Maryland Innovation Initiative Funding (award no. 1120-012_2), the USDA McIntire-Stennis project (award no. MD-PSLA-20006), NRT-INFEWS: UMD Global STEWARDS through the NSF National Research Traineeship Program (award no. 1828910) and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. This story does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.
IMAGE: DR JIE LI EXAMINES VITAMIN D ENRICHED TOMATOESview more
CREDIT: PHIL ROBINSON
Tomatoes gene-edited to produce vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, could be a simple and sustainable innovation to address a global health problem.
Researchers used gene editing to turn off a specific molecule in the plant’s genome which increased provitamin D3 in both the fruit and leaves of tomato plants. It was then converted to vitamin D3 through exposure to UVB light.
Vitamin D is created in our bodies after skin’s exposure to UVB light, but the major source is food. This new biofortified crop could help millions of people with vitamin D insufficiency, a growing issue linked to higher risk of cancer, dementia, and many leading causes of mortality. Studies have also shown that vitamin D insufficiency is linked to increased severity of infection by Covid-19.
Tomatoes naturally contain one of the building blocks of vitamin D3, called provitamin D3 or 7-dehydrocholesterol (7-DHC), in their leaves at very low levels. Provitamin D3, does not normally accumulate in ripe tomato fruits.
Researchers in Professor Cathie Martin’s group at the John Innes Centre used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to make revisions to the genetic code of tomato plants so that provitamin D3 accumulates in the tomato fruit. The leaves of the edited plants contained up to 600 ug of provitamin D3 per gram of dry weight. The recommended daily intake of vitamin d is 10 ug for adults.
When growing tomatoes leaves are usually waste material, but those of the edited plants could be used for the manufacture of vegan-friendly vitamin D3 supplements, or for food fortification.
“We’ve shown that you can biofortify tomatoes with provitamin D3 using gene editing, which means tomatoes could be developed as a plant-based, sustainable source of vitamin D3,” said Professor Cathie Martin, corresponding author of the study which appears in Nature Plants.
“Forty percent of Europeans have vitamin D insufficiency and so do one billion people world-wide. We are not only addressing a huge health problem, but are helping producers, because tomato leaves which currently go to waste, could be used to make supplements from the gene-edited lines.”
Previous research has studied the biochemical pathway of how 7-DHC is used in the fruit to make molecules and found that a particular enzyme Sl7-DR2 is responsible for converting this into other molecules.
To take advantage of this the researchers used CRISPR-Cas 9 to switch off this Sl7-DR2 enzyme in tomato so that the 7DHC accumulates in the tomato fruit.
They measured how much 7-DHC there was in the leaves and fruits of these edited tomato plants and found that there was a substantial increase in levels of 7-DHC in both the leaves and fruit of the edited plants.
The 7-DHC accumulates in both the flesh and peel of the tomatoes.
The researchers then tested whether the 7-DHC in the edited plants could be converted to vitamin D3 by shining UVB light on leaves and sliced fruit for 1 hour. They found that it did and was highly effective.
After treatment with UVB light to turn the 7-DHC into Vitamin D3, one tomato contained the equivalent levels of vitamin D as two medium sized eggs or 28g tuna – which are both recommended dietary sources of vitamin D.
The study says that vitamin D in ripe fruit might be increased further by extended exposure to UVB, for example during sun-drying.
Blocking the enzyme in the tomato had no effect on growth, development or yield of the tomato plants. Other closely related plants such as aubergine, potato and pepper have the same biochemical pathway so the method could be applied across these vegetable crops.
Earlier this month the UK Government announced an official review to examine whether food and drink should be fortified with vitamin D to address health inequalities.
Most foods contain little vitamin D and plants are generally very poor sources. Vitamin D3 is the most bioavailable form of vitamin D and is produced in the body when the skin is exposed to sunlight. In winter and in higher latitudes people need to get vitamin D from their diet or supplements because the sun is not strong enough for the body to produce it naturally.
First author of the study Dr Jie Li said: “The Covid-19 pandemic has helped to highlight the issue of vitamin D insufficiency and its impact on our immune function and general health. The provitamin D enriched tomatoes we have produced offer a much-needed plant-based source of the sunshine vitamin. That is great news for people adopting a plant-rich, vegetarian or vegan diet, and for the growing number of people worldwide suffering from the problem of vitamin D insufficiency.”
‘Biofortified tomatoes provide a new route to vitamin D sufficiency’ appears in Nature Plants.
IMAGE: ERIC W. SCHMIDT, PH.D., PROFESSOR, MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY OF UTAHview more
CREDIT: KRISTAN JACOBSEN FOR UNIVERSITY OF UTAH HEALTH
(Salt Lake City) - The bottom of the ocean is full of mysteries but scientists have recently uncovered one of its best-kept secrets. For 25 years, drug hunters have been searching for the source of a natural chemical that had shown promise in initial studies for treating cancer. Now, researchers at University of Utah Health report that easy-to-find soft corals—flexible corals that resemble underwater plants—make the elusive compound.
Identifying the source allowed the researchers to go a step further and find the animal’s DNA code for synthesizing the chemical. By following those instructions, they were able to carry out the first steps of re-creating the soft coral chemical in the laboratory.
“This is the first time we have been able to do this with any drug lead on Earth,” says Eric Schmidt, Ph.D., professor of medicinal chemistry at U of U Health. He led the study with Paul Scesa, Ph.D., postdoctoral scientist and first author, and Zhenjian Lin, Ph.D., assistant research professor.
The advance opens the possibility of producing the compound in the large amounts needed for rigorous testing and could one day result in a new tool to fight cancer.
A second research group led by Bradley Moore, Ph.D., from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, independently showed that corals make related molecules. Both studies are published in the May 23 issue of Nature Chemical Biology.
A World of Possibilities
Soft corals have thousands of drug-like compounds that could work as anti-inflammatory agents, antibiotics, and more. But getting enough of these compounds has been a major barrier to developing them into drugs for clinical use. Schmidt says that these other compounds should also now be accessible using this new approach.
Corals aren’t the only animals that harbor potential therapeutics. Nature is crawling with snakes, spiders and other animals known to carry chemicals with healing properties. Yet that compounds from soft corals offer distinct advantages for drug development, Schmidt says.
Unlike venomous chemicals that are injected into prey, corals use their chemicals to ward off predators that try to eat them. Since they are made to be eaten, the soft coral chemicals are easily digestible. Similarly, drugs derived from these types of compounds should be able to be given as pills with a glass of water, rather than taken by injection or other more invasive means. “These compounds are harder to find but they’re easier to make in the lab and easier to take as medicine,” says Schmidt.
These possibilities had been just out of reach for decades. Getting to this point took the right know-how, and a little luck.
CAPTION
Soft corals make thousands of drug-like compounds that could work as anti-inflammatory agents, antibiotics, anti-cancer therapeutics, and more.
CREDIT
Bailey Miller
Hunting for the Source
Scesa found the long-sought-after compound in a common species of soft coral living off the Florida coast—just a mile from his brother’s apartment. In the 1990s, marine scientists reported that a rare coral near Australia carried a chemical, eleutherobin, with anti-cancer properties. The chemical disrupts the cytoskeleton, a key scaffold in cells, and soft corals use it as a defense against predators. But laboratory studies showed that the compound was also a potent inhibitor of cancer cell growth.
In the decades after, scientists searched but could not find the fabled “holy grail” chemical in the quantities needed for drug development and couldn’t remedy the problem without understanding how the chemical was made. Dogma had it that, similar to other kinds of marine life, the chemical was synthesized by symbiotic organisms that lived inside the animals.
“It didn’t make sense,” Scesa says. “We knew that corals must make eleutherobin.” After all, he and Schmidt reasoned, some soft coral species don’t have symbiotic organisms and yet their bodies contain the same class of chemicals.
Solving the mystery seemed a job made for Scesa. As a boy growing up in Florida, the ocean was his playground, and he spent countless hours exploring its depths and wildlife. In graduate school, he developed a penchant for organic chemistry and combined the two interests to better understand the chemical diversity of the seas.
Later, he joined the lab of natural products scientist Schmidt with a mission to track down the source of the drug lead. Scesa suspected coral species familiar to him might have the answer and brought small live samples from Florida to Utah, and the real hunt began.
CAPTION
Paul Scesa, Ph.D., dives for soft corals off the Florida coast. He studies the potential of soft coral chemicals as drug leads.
CREDIT
Paul Scesa
Decoding the Recipe
The next step was to find out whether the coral’s genetic code carried instructions for making the compound. Advances in DNA technology had recently made it possible to rapidly piece together the code of any species. The difficulty was, the scientists didn’t know what the instructions for making the chemical should look like. Imagine searching a cookbook for a certain recipe, only you don’t know what any of the words inside the book mean.
“It’s like going into the dark and looking for an answer where you don’t know the question,” remarks Schmidt.
They addressed the problem by finding regions of coral DNA that resembled genetic instructions for similar types of compounds from other species. After programming bacteria grown in the lab to follow coral DNA instructions specific to the soft coral, the microorganisms were able to replicate the first steps of making the potential cancer therapeutic.
This proved that soft corals are the source of eleutherobin. It also demonstrated that it should be possible to manufacture the compound in the lab. Their work is now focusing on filling in the missing steps of the compound’s recipe and determining the best way to produce large amounts of the potential drug.
“My hope is to one day hand these to a doctor,” says Scesa. “I think of it as going from the bottom of the ocean to bench to bedside.”
Eric W. Schmidt, Ph.D., and Paul Scesa, Ph.D., of the University of Utah research marine natural products that could become drug leads.
CREDIT
Kristan Jacobsen for University of Utah Health
About University of Utah Health
University of Utah Health provides leading-edge and compassionate care for a referral area that encompasses Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and much of Nevada. A hub for health sciences research and education in the region, U of U Health has a $428 million research enterprise and trains the majority of Utah’s physicians and health care providers at its Colleges of Health, Nursing, and Pharmacy and Schools of Dentistry and Medicine. With more than 20,000 employees, the system includes 12 community clinics and five hospitals. U of U Health is recognized nationally as a transformative health care system and provider of world-class care.
IMAGE: WATCHING CORALS BREATHE: A SPECIAL CAMERA RECORDS HOW OXYGEN SENSITIVE PARTICLES FLOW PAST THE CORAL SURFACE. THIS ALLOWS THE RESEARCHERS TO DIRECTLY SEE THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE FLOW FIELD AND OXYGEN CONCENTRATION.view more
CREDIT: SOEREN AHMERKAMP/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR MARINE MICROBIOLOGY
The surface of a coral is rugged. Its hard skeleton is populated by polyps that stretch their tentacles into the surrounding water to filter out food. But how exactly does the water flow over the coral surface, what eddies and flows develop, and what does this mean for the oxygen supply around the coral and its associated algae? Until now, there was no answer to these questions. Now an international research team around Soeren Ahmerkamp from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Klaus Koren from the Aarhus University in Denmark and Lars Behrendt from the Uppsala University and SciLifeLab in Sweden has developed a method that allows studying the flow and oxygen concentrations simultaneously at very small scales. Now it is possible to see how the corals generate a flow with their cilia, thus increasing oxygen transport.
Accurate and fast as never before
Oxygen and life are inextricably linked, from single cells to whole organisms. Across a few micrometers and within milliseconds, oxygen concentrations can change as a result of flow or organisms' activity. Existing methods typically measure oxygen concentrations and flows separately and, as a result, many correlations between these two parameters could not be detected. Ahmerkamp and his colleagues are now doing this in one fell swoop: They measure oxygen concentrations and flow simultaneously and with previously unattained accuracy and speed. The researchers named their newly developed method sensPIV. PIV is the abbreviation for "Particle Image Velocimetry", an established method for measuring flow with particles. Now the “sens” is added, the particles sense their chemical surroundings.
The work was a technical challenge. In fiddly detail, the team managed to produce tiny particles with a diameter of less than 1 micrometre, which are soaked in a luminescent dye (for comparison: A human hair has a diameter of about 100 micrometres). This dye glows brighter the less oxygen is present. “It was particularly important that the particles react very quickly to changes in oxygen concentrations. We also needed special cameras to accurately record the fluorescence,” explains co-author Farooq Moin Jalaluddin from the Max Planck Institute in Bremen. He adds, “With the sensPIV-method sensPIV we are able to resolve in rapid and small-scale fluid flows.”
Useful in medicine, biology, and much more
The possible applications of sensPIV are manifold. Many organisms interact with oxygen, and thus sensPIV can provide answers to open questions in life sciences. Ahmerkamp and his colleagues used it, for example, not only on corals, but also to take a detailed look at how oxygen flows through sand. Small-scale metabolic processes in microbes, animals and plants can also be studied in this way. Numerous other applications are arising in microfluidics, which examines how liquids behave in the smallest of spaces, and in medicine.
The first idea for this method came up already several years ago. "But it was only achievable through the great international team and our close cooperation that the idea has now turned into a functional and versatile application," says Ahmerkamp. Now the team is excited about the upcoming applications of the method. "The particles are not difficult to produce once you know how," says Klaus Koren. They are also thinking about further developing the method: "We would like to make sensPIV receptive to substances other than oxygen. Klaus is already working on it," adds Lars Behrendt.
CAPTION
The flow of newly developed particles across the coral surface is clearly visible.
CREDIT
Soeren Ahmerkamp/Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology
Simultaneous visualization of flow fields and oxygen concentrations to unravel transport and metabolic processes in biological systems.
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
23-May-2022
Response of sensPIV particles to changes in oxygen content (VIDEO)
Study reveals evidence that bacteria can live in snake and spider venoms
Newly published research led by Northumbria University shows that, contrary to what is commonly believed, the venom of snakes and spiders is actually populated with microbes, including bacteria that could cause infection in people who have suffered a bite
VIDEO: NEW RESEARCH SHOWS THAT CONTRARY TO COMMON BELIEF, VENOM IS NOT STERILE AND IS ACTUALLY FULL OF MICROBES. LEAD AUTHOR OF THE STUDY AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR SCIENCES, DR STERGHIOS MOSCHOS, EXPLAINS WHAT THIS COULD POTENTIALLY MEAN FOR FUTURE TREATMENT.view more
CREDIT: NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY
Newly published research led by Northumbria University shows that, contrary to what is commonly believed, the venom of snakes and spiders is actually populated with microbes, including bacteria that could cause infection in people who have suffered a bite.
For decades scientists have thought that animal venom is an entirely sterile environment due to it being full of antimicrobial substances - materials that can kill bacteria.
However, new scientific evidence from research led by Northumbria University Associate Professor in Cellular and Molecular Sciences, Sterghios Moschos and venom biologist Steve Trim, Founder and CSO of biotechnology company Venomtech, has shown that this is not the case.
The work, published today in scientific journal Microbiology Spectrum demonstrates how adaptable microorganisms are. The study provides strong genetic and culture evidence that bacteria can not only survive in the venom glands of several species of snakes and spiders, but can also mutate to resist the notoriously toxic liquid that is venom.
The findings also suggest that victims of venomous animal bites may therefore also need to be treated for infections, not just antivenom to tackle the toxins deposited through the bite.
The publication of the study follows the news that Northumbria University’s research power continues to grow with results from the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) showing Northumbria University with the biggest rise in research power ranking of any UK university. Its research power ranking rose to 23rd, having previously risen to 50thin 2014 from 80th in 2008, making Northumbria the sector’s largest riser in research power ranking for the second time.
Challenging the dogma of venom sterility
Seeking to address a gap in research, Dr Moschos and colleagues investigated the venom of five snake and two spider species. “We found that all venomous snakes and spiders that we tested had bacterial DNA in their venom,” explained Dr Moschos.
“Common diagnostic tools failed to identify these bacteria correctly - if you were infected with these, a doctor would end up giving you the wrong antibiotics, potentially making matters worse.
“When we sequenced their DNA we clearly identified the bacteria and discovered they had mutated to resist the venom. This is extraordinary because venom is like a cocktail of antibiotics, and it is so thick with them, you would have thought the bacteria would not stand a chance. Not only did they stand a chance, they had done it twice, using the same mechanisms,” added Dr Moschos.
“We also directly tested the resistance of Enterococcus faecalis, one of the species of bacteria we found in the venom of black-necked spitting cobras, to venom itself and compared it to a classic hospital isolate: the hospital isolate did not tolerate the venom at all, but our two isolates happily grew in the highest concentrations of venom we could throw at them.”
Implications for clinical treatment
2.7 million venomous bite-related injuries occur annually, predominantly across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Of these, it is thought that 75% of victims will develop infections in venom toxin-damaged tissue, with bacteria Enterococcus faecalis being a common cause of disease.
These infections have previously been thought to be a consequence of having an open wound from the bite, as opposed to the infection-causing bacteria having come from the venom itself.
The researchers say that their study shows the need for clinicians to consider treating snakebite victims not just for tissue destruction, but for infection too, as quickly as possible.
Steve Trim of Venomtech added: “By exploring the resistance mechanisms that help these bacteria survive, we can find entirely new ways of attacking multi-drug resistance, potentially through engineering antimicrobial venom peptides.”
