Predatory pollination

Come closer dearie...

Image courtesy of Stefan Doetterl.

With its needle-like teeth and pitcher shape the South African parachute plant looks like it ought to be carnivorous. It very nearly is. Flies that enter fall into a pit of pollen and cannot get out until the pod they are in begins to wilt and the teeth holding them captive weaken. Yet many mysteries have remained. Flies are not known for their intelligence but it seems odd that they would be so willing to crawl into such a treacherous looking cavity.  Now a new study is revealing that the plant is releasing chemicals that dupe the insects into believing that their favourite prey are lying wounded within. 

You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.

Podcast: Not worth a second glance

The upper crust of society is commonly characterised as being aloof. Indeed, the trait has come to stand as an archetype for the social class. Yet it has been an open question as to whether this reputation is deserved and, if it is, why joining the higher echelons leads people to behave this way. Now a new experiment is revealing that members of the upper classes actually pay a lot less attention to the faces of other people as they walk down a street than members of the lower classes do. You can listen to the full story on The Economist's science podcast Babbage here.

Just add water

There is tremendous potential for living cells to be used for the biosynthesis of drugs, therapeutic proteins, and other valuable commodities. However, the need for specialised equipment and refrigeration for production and distribution has made it crazy difficult for these technologies to be used in the remote and low resource areas where they are often needed. To circumvent this challenge, a team has invented a portable device that uses pellets made from the freeze-dried bits of cells that manage DNA and arrange for protein manufacture which can be easily hydrated and put to use. 

The researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of their new technique by using it to manufacture the proteins that are needed for the vaccine for diphtheria. This synthetic foundry that they've created has the potential to be harnessed for the production of other vaccines and, if it proves financially viable to mass produce, could save a lot of lives in the developing world.

You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.

Feed a fever?

For treatment of viral infections only.

Image courtesy of Hoyabird8. 

Whether the adage goes that it is best to feed a fever and starve a cold or the other way around depends upon which grandparent you ask. However, no matter how you square it,  the concept of meddling with diet during times of illness is old. More importantly, the body does this all on its own by making you lose your appetite during certain sorts of infections. However, nobody has really looked into the biochemistry of all this. Now a new study is revealing that glucose is key.

The researchers behind the work knew from past animal studies that fasting was helpful for surviving some but not all infections. They also knew that fasting was vital to surviving really terrible bacterial infections. This led them to wonder which aspect of fasting was helping to combat the bacteria.

To explore this, they infected mice with dangerous bacterial and viral infections and monitored how they responded to diets that were limited in various ways. Glucose restriction dramatically improved survival in the mice with bacterial infections but proved lethal in the mice with viral infections. The reason for this, they suspect, is because bacterial infections drive cells in the body to shift from relying heavily on glucose for energy to relying on other compounds and that when glucose is provided in large amounts it gives the cells fuel that they cannot possibly use which forces the body to expend precious resources processing the unused glucose.

You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.    

Navigating into darkness

Eye diseases like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy are among the leading causes of blindness worldwide. The good news is there are several drug therapies that can be used to treat these disorders and prevent a total loss of sight. The bad news is that these therapies require drugs to be delivered to the back of the eyeball with a syringe. Understandably, most people are like me and don't even like the pairing of the words "needle" and "eyeball" in the same sentence. As a result, many patients opt for far less effective treatments. Now a team has found a way to provide this valuable therapy to the back of the eye with topical drops.

Blindness from both macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy are the result of blood vessels growing out of control behind the eye. The vessels are tamed with drugs that have to be brought to the tissues they are growing in. To avoid having to inject these drugs, researchers speculated that they might be able to make use of a drug-ferrying synthetic polymer with a peptide known as penetratin. They knew that the peptide had good permeability in the eye and speculated that pairing it with the polymer might allow drugs carried in this way to migrate to the rear of the eyeball. The team tested this out on rats and found that the complex rapidly migrated to the rear of their eyeballs in reasonable concentrations. Perhaps more importantly, they found that it stayed in the back of the eyeball for more than eight hours - long enough for the drugs to have their needed effect. This hideously complex research published in Applied Materials and Interfaces and, if you fancy trying to digest the original paper, you can do so here.