Antibiotic from poison
Researchers from Stanford University together with Mexican scientists have discovered that scorpion venom contains non-poisonous substances that effectively fight bacterial infections.
Scientists have managed not only to isolate these compounds from scorpion venom, but also to synthesize them in the laboratory. Artificially synthesized substances killed staphylococci and drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria in mouse tissue samples.
The studies were conducted on scorpions of the species Diplocentrus melici.
Collecting this type of scorpions is difficult, because in the winter and dry seasons they are dormant, and only in the rainy season it becomes possible to detect them.
The "milking" of scorpions is the stimulation of the tail with soft electrical impulses. Scientists managed to extract only 0.5 microliters of poison, 10 times less than the amount of blood that a mosquito can get in one bite, but even in this droplet it was possible to see that when interacting with air, the poison changed color from transparent to brownish.
Upon further investigation, it turned out that this effect was produced by two compounds, one of which turned red under the influence of air, and the other turned blue.
Using various chemical analysis methods, it was found out that the color-changing ingredients in the poison were two previously unknown benzoquinones (a class of ring-shaped molecules with antimicrobial properties).
The benzoquinones in scorpion venom turned out to be almost identical to each other, but blue contains one more sulfur atom than red.
The compounds obtained in the laboratory were tested for biological activity.
Red benzoquinone was particularly effective in killing highly infectious staphylococcus bacteria, whereas blue was lethal to both normal and antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that cause tuberculosis, but left the lung epithelium intact in mice. That is, as a medicine, scorpion poison is safe.
Obtaining one gallon of natural poison will cost about $ 39 million, and the antimicrobial properties of the compounds were discovered only due to the fact that the poison was synthesized. Scientists plan to further determine whether the substances found can work as drugs separately, and also why they are primarily present in the poison.
The article Carcamo-Noriega et al. 1,4-Benzoquinone antimicrobial agents against Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis derived from scorpion venom is published in the journal PNAS.
Elena Panasyuk, portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru / based on Stanford News: Stanford researchers synthesize healing compounds in scorpion venom.