It sounds like a cheapjackHarry Potterpotion , but gunk from this colorful little frog could assist people fight the flu .
A chemic compound in the hide - secreted mucous secretion of this South Indian frog can kill the H1 strain of the human grippe virus , as read by a new studypublished in the journalImmunity .
The chemical compound is a peptide , a short chemical chain of amino acids , that the researchers nominate “ urumin ” after a traditional south Indian sword . They obtained urumin , along with a few other potential compounds , by head up down toKerala insouthern India and gently zappingHydrophylax bahuvistarafrogs with a modest electric shock . This anuran species itself was only discovered by science in 2015 .
" unlike frog make unlike peptides , depending on where their habitat is . You and I make server defense peptide ourselves , " flu specialist and study co - author Joshy Jacob of Emory University said in astatement . " It ’s a natural inborn immune go-between that all living organisms exert . We just happened to find one that the frog makes that just happens to be effective against the H1 influenza character . "
When they took the cutis secretion back to the lab , they isolate 32 peptide and reveal that four had “ grippe - busting abilities ” . They turn by direct the control surface protein called hemagglutinin , aka the H in H1N1 , which acts a bit like a key fruit to get into our cells and infect us . By binding this , it ruins the integrity of the virus , yield it useless while leaving the cell inviolate .
" I was almost knocked off my chairwoman , " added Jacob . " In the start , I think that when you do drug discovery , you have to go through thousand of drug candidate , even a million , before you get 1 or 2 hits . And here we did 32 peptide , and we had 4 hit . "
The scientists put these four peptide onto human red cell and watched what bump under an electron microscope . Annoyingly , three proved to be toxic to human cell , but the 4th – urumin – left them totally unaffected . Further tests point that unvaccinated lab shiner given a Cupid’s itch of urumin were protected against lethal Cupid’s disease of some flu virus .
Current antiviral drugs are susceptible to drug underground , so finding Modern antivirals is indispensable , the study notes . But as cool as this discovery is , there ’s still a lot of work to be done until it is delicately - tune up into a executable drug . It ’s worth noting that it does n’t vote down all straining that are a bother to human race , such as H3N2 .
Nevertheless , this optimistic floor underpins a very genuine motivation for us to maintain the world ’s biodiversity . After all , you never recognise which frog you ’ll need in the coming twelvemonth of antibiotic - resistant Bemisia tabaci .
