Ancient Sponges May Help Humans Survive

Researchers led by Moeller, of Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston, found a sponge thriving in the midst of dead organisms. This anomalous life amidst death raised an obvious question, says Moeller: “How is this thing surviving when everything else is dead?”

Chemical analyses of the sponge’s chemical defense factory pointed to a compound called algeferin. Biofilms, communities of bacteria notoriously resistant to antibiotics, dissolved when treated with fragments of the algeferin molecule. And new biofilms did not form. _ScienceNews

Sea sponges live in a very tough neighborhood, microbially speaking. The billion-year arms race between competing organisms, and between predator and prey, has left a long trail of failed survival strategies in its wake. But the strategies that have worked, time and time again, can prove extremely potent.

Humans have their own arms race against bacteria, involving human manufactured antibiotics vs. some very clever strategies developed by bacteria over a billion year span or so. On the front lines of this battle, inside most of the hospitals of the world, bacteria are winning. Humans have been forced to come up with ever more expensive strategies to combat multiply resistant bacteria. What if we could borrow powerful strategies from other, more "street savvy" organisms? More of us might survive longer.

The compound is able to reprogram antibiotic-resistant bacteria that don’t form biofilms. When bacteria are treated with the compound, antibiotics that usually have no effect are once again lethal. This substance may be the first one that can restore bacterial resistance, Moeller says. “This resensitization is brand new.”

And the problem of perpetuating a bacterial-resistance arms race, in which bacteria rapidly develop countermeasures against new antibiotics, may be avoided entirely with the new compound. “Since the substance is nontoxic to the bacterium, it’s not throwing up any red flags,” says Moeller.

...The research is still in very early phases.

“Everyone would like to see this in antibiotic trials tomorrow,” Moeller says, but treatments for human infections are a long way off.

Sotka agrees. “Of course, we need clinical trials to take it to the next level,” she says. _ScienceNews

Scientists are sending out "scouts" to all the continents, oceans, seas, lakes, large islands, mountain peaks, and polar extremes of the world to find the winners of the ancient arms race between microbes, and between microbes and multi-cellular organisms. Improved mass screening technologies allow rapid throughput analyses of these organsims and their strategies, so that we can select the best in their class, for our purposes.

Under the Obama / Pelosi reich, the rich biomedical research community is likely to be starved for funds to conduct such research, since the new reich plans on diverting most of America's wealth -- including private sector wealth -- into government run human and social services.

Even so, the current momentum of research in university science labs, corporate labs, and other labs performing actual science, will persist for some years to come. It will take time for the reich's changed priorities to take over all the research funding agencies. Everything hinges upon the American voter, and whether they will wake up in time.