Science News | 10 Sept 2010
Cockroach Brains May Hold New Antibiotics?Cockroaches may be nasty bugs, but they could help fight even nastier ones. New research finds that the rudimentary brains of cockroaches and locusts teem with antimicrobial compounds that slay harmful E. coli and MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph bacterium. The work could lead to new compounds for fighting infectious diseases in humans.
Extracts of ground-up brain and other nerve tissue from the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, and desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria, killed more than 90 percent of a type of E. coli that causes meningitis, and also killed methicillin-resistant staph, microbiologist Simon Lee reported September 7 at the Society for General Microbiology meeting at the University of Nottingham in England.
...
The team ground up various body parts from both cockroaches and locusts that had been reared in the lab and incubated them for two hours with different bacteria. Leaving these mixtures overnight on petri dishes revealed that the extracts from brains and from locust thorax nerve tissue killed nearly 100 percent of the bacteria.
Yet the insect brain extracts didn’t seem to bother human kidney or epithelial cells when grown with them in a lab dish.
National Geographic | Daily News | 09 Sept 2010
Locust brains could thwart superbug plaguesInsects naturally kill deadly MRSA and E. coli bacteria, experiment shows.
Cockroaches may make your skin crawl, but the insects—or, to be exact, their brains—could one day save your life.
That's because the central nervous systems of American cockroaches produce natural antibiotics that can kill off bacteria often deadly to humans, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and toxic strains of Escherichia coli, scientists said this week.
Two species of locust tested so far also have the same bacteria-killing molecules in their tiny heads.
The findings suggest that the insect world—which makes up 80 percent of all animals on Earth—may be teeming with new antibiotics, said study co-author Simon Lee of the University of Nottingham in the U.K.
Such a discovery is crucial, because scientists are scrambling to combat strains of several infectious diseases, including MRSA and E. coli, that are resistant to traditional antibiotics, Lee said.
New Scientist | Health | 06 Sept 2010
Extracts from the brains of locusts and cockroaches can kill hospital superbugs. Work is under way to identify the active ingredients, which could ultimately result in the first antibiotics originating from insects.
Nine distinct chemical extracts from the locust brain killed Escherichia coli, which can cause food poisoning, and seven killed Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the problematic superbug sweeping hospitals and communities throughout the western world.
Researchers screened brains, along with other tissues, for antibacterial activity on the grounds that the brain is the most vital organ for locusts to protect.