Wallaby Milk Better than Penicillin - Biomimicry at Work
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 04.25.06
This one’s to show we can do cute and furry, while still bringing you news of environmental import. The Tammar Wallaby might just hold an answer to the dilemma of super bugs. These are bacteria that have developed resistance to our indiscriminate use of antibiotics. (And try buying a cleaning product in your big box store these days that doesn’t scream ‘antibacterial’.) Anyhow, the likes of Golden staph is back in our hospitals, and pencillin is losing its effectiveness, in many instances, to ward off such infectious beasties. So researchers are very interested in the Tammar Wallaby. When born, the kidney bean, that is a baby ‘joey’, has to crawl up its mum’s belly, from womb to pouch. All without a lung, mind you. (One day old joey seen in middle pic) Once safely anchored to the teat, it is dependent on the mother’s milk to provide all its immune protection for the first 100 days of life. Seems this milk is rather potent stuff. Against some bacteria it’s 100 times more aggressive, than even the best strain of penicillin. (Biomimicry is about taking notes from the pages of nature’s overly bountiful scrapbook. The great concern is that with umpteen species now on a new fast track to extinction, we may be left holding a book, from which many of the vital pages have been torn out.) Via ::New Scientist
PS. The pic on the right is by Thorsten Milse, who was a category runner-up in the BBC Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2005. And rightly so. His drop dead gorgeous photographs of a polar bear mother with her cubs would have fans of Cute Overload delirious with joy. And any self respecting treehugger rushing out to save polar icecaps from melting.
What a reach. Your biomimicry tag to this story is WAAAAY oversold.
This antimicrobial activity in the milk is from a compound naturally produced by the wallaby and you're comparing it to a natural product produced by mold? How is this biomimicry? They are BOTH naturally occuring products! Biomimicry would be to skip the wallaby and talk about daptomycin or tigecycline, not wallaby milk.
Plus your comparison to penicillin comes out of nowhere. Where in any of these articles do the researchers make any comparison to penicillin? Why not, say, vancomycin or tetracycline?
Important science but lame writeup.
Out of nowhere? That's odd, I'm sure the New Scientist link, as provided at base of post, said thus: "Cocks has found that the mother's milk contains a molecule that is 100 times more effective against Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli than the most potent form of penicillin. The molecule, called AGG01, also kills four types of Gram-positive bacteria and one type of fungus."
Biomimicry: "Applying lessons learned from the study of natural methods and systems to the design of technology." From Dictionary of Sustainable Management.
From Chapter 5, 'How will we heal ourselves?' of the book Biomimicry, "Presumably the individuals that managed to fight off infections in such crowded settings would be chock-full of ingenious antibiotics, some of which may benefit us." (Janine Benyus was referring to seals in that example, but sounds remarkably similar to the wallaby research to me.)
I'd be interested in knowing if human mother's milk contained this same molecule...or something similar. Breastmilk contains some AMAZING things to protect against all types infections, cancers, HIV/AIDS, allergies, etc.
We drink cows milk, why is it so absurd to think of drinking milk made for us? It even comes pasteurized (believe it or not!)
Technically, a case study of biomimicry is one in which researchers have not just identified the strategy, but then gone on to mimic it (without actually harvesting (from) the creature). Fortunately, synthesizing molecules can be done, and this compound is a perfect candidate. (In fact, I will add this to our database and note it as an idea ripe for mimicking). Hopefully, a lab will pick up on this and run with it. However, it's not necessarily the answer for antibiotics, as it might very well act in the same way as other antibiotics, continuing to select for "super-bacteria".