antibiotic

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a pretty scary thing, which is why researchers are working so hard to come up with new and creative ways to fight them off. Take for example nanosponges. In a presentation from the Experimental Biology meeting in Chicago last month, researchers from the University of California in San Diego are testing the use of nanosponges (shown on the right in the figure below) to bind and inactivate toxins that are released from bacteria.   Image Credit: Tamara Escajadillo, University of California, San Diego Nanosponges are basically the membrane of red blood cells…

Picture of a komodo dragon by CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Researchers studying komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) at George Mason University discovered 48 previously unknown peptides in their blood that might have antimicrobial properties. Their findings were published in the Journal of Proteome Research. For the largest lizard, these peptides may help prevent the animals from getting infections from their own saliva, which is host to at least 57 species of bacteria. With this number of bacteria, it is easy to understand why they evolved so many defense mechanisms to prevent…

Day 4 of the meeting turned out to be pretty exciting for a comparative physiologist as well. The first session that I went to was called "RNASEQ approaches to understanding extreme physiological adaptations." Considering the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section business and dinner meeting was the night before, I was impressed at my ability to make it to an 8:00am session the following morning. The first seminar from Dr. Brooke C Harrison  (Univ. Colorado, Boulder) was on "Extreme cardiac growth and metabolism in the Burmese python after feeding." He spoke about how the cells of…