Shark Bites No Match For Dolphins' Powers Of Healing

by Maureen Langlois

from http://www.npr.org/

 

Enlarge Courtesy of Dr. Michael Zasloff

  Nari, a dolphin bitten by a shark in February 2009, was almost completely healed one month later.

Courtesy of Dr. Michael Zasloff

 

Nari, a dolphin bitten by a shark in February 2009, was almost completely healed one month later.

Dr. Michael Zasloff, a surgeon and researcher at Georgetown University, is famous for discovering compounds in the skin of frogs and sharks that can fight disease in humans.

Now, he's tapping another animal to mine the secrets of its immune system. It turns out dolphins have a remarkable ability to heal quickly—and seemingly painlessly—from severe shark bites. Zasloff hopes that learning how dolphins resist infection and use stem cells to rebuild missing tissue will provide some insight into how to help injured humans.

To do this research, Zasloff reviewed the "clinical histories" of a few dolphins who recently succumbed to shark bites. He also interviewed all the dolphin experts he could find. His results appeared in a letter in the online version of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
  Shots caught up with Zasloff last week to learn more about his adventures in dolphin biology.
Q: OK, so imagine a human and a dolphin both being bitten by a shark. How would the healing process differ between the two?

Well, the dolphin wouldn't hemorrhage...or have any infection, which is miraculous. And despite having sustained massive tissue injury, within about month the animal will restore its normal body contour. There'll be some surface markings, but a chunk of tissue maybe the size of a football will have been restored with essentially no deformity.

And what is equally amazing is that handlers who know these animals will tell you that they observe absolutely no indications in the animal's behavior that it's in pain.

Q: And the human?
Even if it was a tiny bite, we would die of sepsis, or infection, within three or four days if we weren't given antibiotics because sharks have a lot of dangerous bacteria in their teeth. Then we'd have to make sure all the [infected tissue] was removed. If we were lucky and got it all, we'd still have this massive hole, which you may or may not be able to fill.

Q: Why are dolphins so good at healing?
Dolphin blubber makes compounds like organohalogens that act as natural antibiotics and keep the tissue from getting infected.


The next mystery is the recovery of contour [of the body]. When the animal restores its wound, it regenerates the complex structure of blubber. It doesn't create a scar; it produces a sort of patch that ultimately is woven back into the surrounding tissue.

What is exciting is that there must be great numbers of stem cells [involved], and by looking at these stem cells, we would probably be able to identify what they are and possibly even the hormones or proteins that are involved in their expansion. And if we looked for comparable cells in man, these might be the very cells that we would want to use to promote healing of complex wounds in us.

Q: So what are the next steps for research?
Identification of the antimicrobial agents, which have to be in those tissues. All you'd have to do is take some dolphin blubber, extract it, and start looking for stuff that would kill bacteria.

And with the pain issue, it's the same thing. You would take the blubber or the regenerating tissue, you'd isolate stuff—purified components or crude—and you'd administer it to mice. And lo and behold, you may find, in the regenerating tissue or the decomposing blubber, the long-sought natural morphine that we've been looking for.

Q: You've gone through the process of drug development with some of the compounds you've found in the tissue of other animals—frogs, for instance. How long before we see dolphin-inspired therapies?
I wish I could work on this, but I don't have access to dolphins. So I'm just putting this out there for other researchers to see. Once you appreciate that this is kind of a miracle, it isn't terribly hard to come up with ideas [for how to do the research]. The hardest part is to realize that there's a miracle in your midst.

New solution can help 'permanently get rid of germs'

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/

The solution does not wash away even after multiple hot laundry cycles, according to its inventor Dr Jason Locklin.

Continue reading the main story

A new anti-microbial treatment that can make clothing - including smelly socks - permanently germ-free has been developed by US scientists.

The spray-on solution can be applied to existing garments, according to the team from the University of Georgia.

It is designed to offer low cost protection for healthcare facilities, such as hospitals.

Chemical impregnated materials already exist, but have to be added during the manufacturing process.

The new solution can be applied to natural and synthetic textiles including clothes, home carpets, shoes and even plastics.

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces, Dr Jason Locklin and his colleagues state that the treatment kills a wide range of dangerous pathogens, including staph, strep, E. coli, pseudomonas and acetinobacter.

The inventor (centre) says the product can be useful in the medical field

Many of these can cause disease, break down fabrics, create stains and produce odours.

When the scientists tested the product, they found that a single application was enough to stop all further bacterial growth at up to 37 degrees Celsius.

And the solution did not degrade even after multiple hot water laundry cycles.

Medical field

Although it could potentially be used in a number of fields, its primary application is expected to be in healthcare.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Similar technologies are limited by cost of materials, use of noxious chemicals in the application or loss of effectiveness after a few washings”

End Quote Gennaro Gama University of Georgia

According to the US federal agency Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one in every 20 hospitalised patients contracts a healthcare-associated infection.

Lab coats, scrub suits, uniforms, gowns, gloves and linens are all known to be breeding grounds for harmful microbes.

"The spread of pathogens on textiles and plastics is a growing concern, especially in healthcare facilities and hotels, which are ideal environments for the proliferation and spread of very harmful micro-organisms," said Dr Locklin.

People are also trying to get rid of dangerous microbes at home, especially when it comes to food packaging, plastic furniture and their children's bath toys.

But not all anti-bacterial products are cheap or effective.

"Similar technologies are limited by cost of materials, use of noxious chemicals in the application or loss of effectiveness after a few washings," said Gennaro Gama from the University of Georgia Research Foundation (UGARF).

"Locklin's technology uses ingeniously simple, inexpensive and scalable chemistry."

NASA Finds New Life (Updated with Pictures)

From: http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. Updated.

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

 
The new life forms up close, at five micrometers.

But not this one. This one is completely different. We knew that there were microorganisms that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic, with phosphorus absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

 
Even closer, showing their internal structure.
No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn't been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life. [NOS—In Dutch]

Mono Lake photography by Sathish J — Creative Commons

'Rosetta Stone' Of Bacterial Communication Discovered

On the left is Anand Pai and on the right is Lingchong You of Duke University. (Credit: Duke University Photography

ScienceDaily (July 13, 2009) — The Rosetta Stone of bacterial communication may have been found. Although they have no sensory organs, bacteria can get a good idea about what's going on in their neighborhood and communicate with each other, mainly by secreting and taking in chemicals from their surrounding environment. Even though there are millions of different kinds of bacteria with their own ways of sensing the world around them, Duke University bioengineers believe they have found a principle common to all of them.

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The researchers said that a more complete understanding of communication between cells and bacteria is essential to the advancement of the new field of synthetic biology, where populations of genetically altered bacteria are "programmed" to do certain things. Such re-programmed bacterial gene circuits could see a wide variety of applications in medicine, environmental cleanup and biocomputing.

It is already known that a process known as "quorum sensing" underlies communication between bacteria. However, each type of bacteria seems to have its own quorum-sensing abilities, with tremendous variations, the researchers said.

"Quorum sensing is a cell-to-cell communication mechanism that enables bacteria to sense and respond to changes in the density of the bacteria in a given environment," said Anand Pai, graduate student in bioengineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "It regulates a wide variety of biological functions such as bioluminescence, virulence, nutrient foraging and cellular suicide."

The researchers found that the total volume of bacteria in relation to the volume of their environment is a key to quorum sensing, no matter what kind of microbe is involved.

"If there are only a few cells in an area, nothing will happen," Pai said. "If there are a lot of cells, the secreted chemicals are high in concentration, causing the cells to perform a specific action. We wanted to find out how these cells know when they have reached a quorum."

Pai and scientist Lingchong You, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and a member of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and Center for Systems Biology, have discovered what they believe is a common root among the different forms of quorum sensing. In an article in the July 2009 issue of the journal Molecular Systems Biology, they term this process "sensing potential."

"Sensing potential is essentially the linking of an action to the number of cells and the size of their environment," You said. "For example, a small number of cells would act differently than the same number of cells in a much larger space. No matter what type of cell or their own quorum sensing abilities, the relationship between the size of a cell and the size of its environment is the common thread we see in all quorum sensing systems.

"This analysis provides novel insights into the fundamental design of quorum sensing systems," You said. "Also, the overall framework we defined can serve as a foundation for studying the dynamics and the evolution of quorum sensing, as well as for engineering synthetic gene circuits based on cell-to-cell communications."

Synthetic gene circuits are carefully designed combinations of genes that can be "loaded" into bacteria or other cells to direct their actions in much the same way that a basic computer program directs a computer. Such re-programmed bacteria would exist as a synthetic ecosystem.

"Each population will synthesize a subset of enzymes that are required for the population as a whole to produce desired proteins or chemicals in a coordinated way," You said. "We may even be able to re-engineer bacteria to deliver different types of drugs or selectively kill cancer cells"

For example, You has already gained insights into the relationship between predators and prey by creating a synthetic circuit involving two genetically altered lines of bacteria. The findings from that work helped define the effects of relative changes in populations.

The research was supported by National Institutes of Health, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, and a DuPont Young Professor Award.

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Adapted from materials provided by Duke University.

Duke University (2009, July 13). 'Rosetta Stone' Of Bacterial Communication Discovered. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 14, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/07/090707093619.htm

Your cell phone is dirtier than a toilet. Here's help!

Cell phones harbor thriving colonies of bacteria and viruses. Researchers say, for example, that cell phones are major carriers of superbugs in hospitals. Now, a new gadget helps you sterilize your phone!

It's no wonder cell phones are so disgusting. Our hands are dirty -- we shake hands with people who are sick, touch bathroom door knobs and pet the dog -- and our mouths spew whatever disease-causing viruses and bacteria are infecting our bodies. Cell phones are constantly coming into contact with both hands and mouth. When they're not, they tend to be tucked a way in pockets, a nice, warm environment that promotes the growth of microorganisms.

Researchers at Ondokuz Mayis University in Turkey tested the cell phones of 200 doctors and nurses and found that nearly all -- 95 percent -- were tainted with bacteria, with some carrying the MRSA superbug that can sicken and even kill patients and that cannot be defeated with any antibiotic. They concluded that doctors and nurses were infecting patients with their cell phones. In the US, MRSA is the cause of most hospital infections.

There are several things you can do to protect yourself and others from your own cell phone. The easiest is to frequently clean your phone with rubbing alcohol.

You can also use a new product from PureLight, a company that makes UV wants for sterilizing large surfaces. Their new portable wand is designed for cell phones.

For the best protection, you can also use one of the methods above, plus use a Bluetooth headset most of the time, to minimize the mouth and hand contact with the phone.

Oral Microbiome: Spit Reveals A Lot About What Lives In Your Mouth

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2009) — Like it or not, your mouth is home to a thriving community of microbial life. More than 600 different species of bacteria reside in this "microbiome," yet everyone hosts a unique set of bugs, and this could have important implications for health and disease.

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Researchers have found that everyone hosts a unique set of salivary microbes in his or her mouth. (Credit: iStockphoto)

Scientists have now performed the first global survey of salivary microbes, finding that the oral microbiome of your neighbor is just as different from yours as someone across the globe.

The human body harbors ten times more bacterial cells than human cells – a stunning figure that suggests a likely dynamic between ourselves and the bacteria we carry, both in healthy and disease states. The National Institutes of Health recently launched an initiative to categorize the microbiomes of several regions of the body, with early studies focusing on the intestines and skin. It is appreciated that the human mouth, a major entry point for bacteria into the body, also contains a diverse array of microbial species. Yet microbiome diversity between individuals, and how this relates to diet, environment, health, and disease, remains unexplored.

In this study, scientists have conducted the first in-depth study of global diversity in a human microbiome, characterizing the microbial life in human saliva from regions around the world. The researchers, led by Dr. Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have sequenced and analyzed variation in the bacterial gene encoding 16S rRNA, a component of the ribosome, in the salivary "metagenome" of 120 healthy subjects from six geographic areas. Stoneking and colleagues then compared the sequences they found with a database of 16S rRNA sequences to categorize the types of bacteria present.

The group observed that there is considerable diversity of bacterial life in the saliva microbiome, both within and between individuals. However, they made an unexpected finding when comparing samples from different geographic areas. "The saliva microbiome does not vary substantially around the world," Stoneking described. "Which seems surprising given the large diversity in diet and other cultural factors that could influence the human salivary microbiome." Stoneking explained that this suggests the life inhabiting the mouth of your next-door neighbor is likely to be just as different from yours as someone on the other side of the world.

Stoneking noted that by studying sequences from an easily obtained saliva sample, their work has provided the foundation for future studies exploring the influence of diet, cultural factors, and disease on variation in the saliva microbiome. In addition, the group's findings could help analyze human migrations and populations. While it may not be pleasant to think about the life teeming in your mouth, it is now evident that we will be able to learn a lot about oral health and disease by understanding what is living there.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany), the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (Shanghai, China), and China Pharmaceutical University (Nanjing City, China) contributed to this study.

This work was supported by the Max Planck Society.