Every weekend in the summer, “Le billet sciences” sets out to discover the solutions provided by living organisms to help us solve our scientific, medical and technical problems. This is called biomimicry. This Saturday, here’s how penguin watching helps advance antibiotic research.
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It all started with an astonishing observation. In Antarctica, particularly in the Crozet Islands archipelago, in the Indian Ocean, the male penguin who incubates his egg for several weeks is able to feed his young when they are born (when the female has not returned from fishing). while he did not move and did not go in search of fresh food. In fact, the male offers his newly born offspring food that he has stored in his stomach for three weeks. A finding that has long intrigued scientists. How is it that foods, especially fish-based, can remain stored for so long without bacterial proliferation?
The team led by Yvon Le Maho, ecophysiologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), dug into the question and they ended up understanding why: the male penguin knows how to keep food intact at 37°C without the bacteria s attack there.
They discovered this secret by analyzing the contents of the penguins’ stomachs by simply making them regurgitate and tricking them so that this operation did not encourage them to abandon their egg. These researchers discovered with the help of Philippe Bulet, research director in biochemistry, the key role played by an antimicrobial molecule from the defensin family. This molecule, which is a protein, does not kill bacteria but it puts them to sleep. The good news is that its action is very effective against resistant bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus (which can cause problems in the hospital) and also against a fungus, Aspergillus fumigatus, responsible for aspergillosis, a infection causing fever and cough, which can sometimes affect some patients in intensive care.
This discovery may lead to the development of a new generation of antibiotics. It will take a few more years to develop a new generation of antibiotics, but research will continue, because after battling for 15 years, this CNRS team has just recently obtained funding to work on this king penguin defensin.
Their work is all the more promising since we already know that this molecule can be reproduced in the laboratory by bioengineering and that beyond its action on resistant bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, there are also prospects for use in humans, particularly in the field of ocular medicine. This antimicrobial molecule being indeed very active in the stomach of penguins which is a saline environment, it could also very likely be so in our eyes which are bathed in tears which are also salty.