Mother's milk from the marsupials known as Tasmanian devils could help the global fight against increasingly deadly "superbugs" which resist antibiotics, Australian researchers said Tuesday. Superbugs are bacteria which cannot be treated by current antibiotics and other drugs, with a recent British study saying they could kill up to 10 million people globally by 2050. Scientists at the University of Sydney found that peptides in the marsupial's milk killed resistant bacteria, including methicillin-resistant golden staph bacteria and enterococcus that is resistant to the powerful antibiotic vancomycin. The researchers turned to marsupials like the devil -- which carry their young in a pouch after birth to complete their development -- because of their biology. The underdeveloped young have an immature immune system when they are born, yet survive growth in their mother's bacteria-filled pouch. "We think this has led to an expansion of these peptides in marsupials," University of Sydney PhD candidate Emma Peel, who worked on the research published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, told AFP. "Marsupials have more peptides than other mammals. In the devil we found six, whereas humans have only one of this type of peptide. "Other research in other marsupials has shown that tammar wallabies have eight of these peptides and opossums have 12," said Peel, adding that studies into koala's milk had now started. The scientists artificially created the antimicrobial peptides, called cathelicidins, after extracting the sequence from the devil's genome, and found they "killed the resistant bacteria... and other bacteria". They are hopeful marsupial peptides could eventually be used to develop new antibiotics for humans to aid the battle against superbugs. "One of the most difficult things in today's world is to try and find new antibiotics for drug-resistant strains of bacteria," the research manager of the university's Australasian Wildlife Genomics Group, Carolyn Hogg, told AFP. "Most of the other previous antibiotics have come from plants, moulds and other work that's been around for close to a 100 years, so it's time to start looking elsewhere." World Health Organisation director-general Margaret Chan warned last month some scientists were describing the impact of superbugs as a "slow-motion tsunami" and the situation was "bad and getting worse".
They come out at night, they have scary teeth, they have a weird name with an extra vowel most people don't pronounce…and they are where Lyme disease goes to die. Say hello to the opossum, the American marsupial with a pointy nose and prehensile tail that dines on ticks like a vacuum dines on dust. Most people drop the first vowel when speaking of 'possums, but possums actually belong to a different species native to Australia. Tiny adolescent ticks that carry Lyme disease bacteria are most active during the late spring months, typically May and even as early as April during warmer years. But whereas these ticks can be found in large numbers on mice, shrews and chipmunks, they are eaten in large numbers by opossum. Research led by scientists based at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook placed different species into cages, covered them with ticks and waited for the biting arachnids to jump off. The scientists then counted how many survived. Opossums can eat or remove as much as 96 percent of the ticks that land on them. Research also suggests the immune system of opossums is fairly effective at fighting off the disease. So even the ticks that do survive a visit to an opossum are less likely to acquire the disease. Cary scientists are continuing to examine the correlation between the frequency of different types of mammals, and the infection rates of ticks found in the same area. The initial thought? Where foxes thrive, Lyme doesn't. That's because foxes are good hunters of the small mammals that serve as the most effective reservoirs of the Lyme pathogen. Ongoing research is also looking at the role opossums play. All of this points to why Lyme is a particularly inscrutable disease. There are so many complex interactions that govern its prevalence — from human land-use development, to shifting climate patterns, to the abundance (or lack) of certain mammals. And that doesn't even address how the disease behaves once it is in the body. The Lyme bacterium is apparently one of the only things on earth that doesn't need iron to survive. Opossums are your friend in the fight against Lyme.
