Sea: A big pharmacy
Rajeev Goel

FROM time immorial, the beauty of the sea has inspired many an artist and writer. Its beaches have fascinated people from all walks of life and they enjoy themselves swimming, surfing and sailing in the sea.

Of late, the medical scientists too have evinced keen interest in its beauty but from a different perspective.

They see sea as a big medical cabinet containing potential biomolecules and drugs that can be obtained from its flora and fauna.

With the help of professional deep sea divers, the researchers have gained access to a variety of marine creatures.

These are creatures like sponges, corals, sea urchins, sea squirts, hydroids, sea anemones, fishes, as well as to varied types of sea plants and the other micro-organisms embedded in the sea bed to extract from them the medications that may one day cure long list of illnesses varying from bacterial infections to cancer, Alzheimer and even AIDS.

The marine researchers have found that sea sponges have many bioactive molecules that can fight fungal infections, skin allergies, viral infections such as herpes, cancer and inflammation without sideeffects associated particularly with the available anti-inflammatory and anticancerous drugs.

The researchers have even discovered a group of bacteria known as marine actinomycets from the coral reef sponges and from the marine sediments that may provide an opportunity to microbiologists to look for novel antibiotics which may one day overcome the menace of developing antibiotic resistance.

Certain corals, particularly the tropical ones, have the structure almost identical to human bone and are being used as a bone substitute to heal fractures in orthopaedic, dental, carinofacial trauma and neurosurgeries.

Chitin, a substance found in shells of crabs and shrips, makes bonding with the red blood cells to form an artificial clot at the site of bleeding thereby sealing massive bleeding wounds in 30 seconds.

As a result shrimp-based bandages are now uses by certain troops in the battelfield to stop excessive bleeding.

An extract from the octopus relieves high blood pressure.

The list is inexhaustive and many more marine species are on the benchtop of bio-marine researchers.

The medical scientists are also plumbing the sea to gain biomedical knowledge to understand how marines creatures are living in extreme environmental conditions like high pressure under the sea, total darkness, acidic, salty or alkaline conditions and low temperature, that otherwise would kill human beings.

This will enable the scientists to apply it to human system to understand and cure diseases.

For example, toadfish has the unusual ability to regenerate its central nervous system and the cue to regeneration in fish would be of importance to human neuro degenerative diseases too.

It is amazing to know that a sea squirt found in the bays of Florida can cure its own congestive heart failure as well as the kidney stones whenever they develop.

The researchers are studying the self-healing mechanism operating in this sea squirt to apply it to similar problems in humans.

A score of bio-medicinal compounds that are in different stages of clinical trials and analysis have also been derived from the sea plants.

A red algae found in Caribbean islands is known to be a potent virility tonic helpful in erectile dysfunctions in males and is consumed as a “Seaweed Drink”.

Similarly, a phycocolloid gel out of a red algae is effective in long term treatment of damage to lungs, particularly after pneumonia, smoking and chronic bronchitis.

Kelps, namely the Bull Kelp, consumed in powered form are effective in curing insomnia, hyperacidity and depression.

Bladderwrack is known to normalise enlarged prostrate in early stages.

Sea, no doubt, contains a big pharmacy for human beings.

The need of the time, however, is to fully identify the bioactive compounds with medicinal properties from the sea so that they could be synthesised in the lab by using advanced tools of genetic engineering.

It’s all in the genes

THE caffeine in coffee is unhealthy for some but beneficial to others, depending on a gene that determines how fast the chemical is metabolised, a study said.

Since tests to determine which form of the gene one carries are not readily available and you cannot feel how fast your body is getting rid of caffeine, the study’s authors recommended reining in coffee consumption to no more than four cups a day.

Slightly more than half the 4,024 study participants, who lived in coffee-rich Costa Rica between 1994 and 2004, had the slow version of the gene while the other half had the fast form. Half had had a nonfatal heart attack, and half had not.

‘’We found in individuals who had the slow version of this gene, as little as two cups of coffee a day is associated with an increased risk of heart disease,’’ said study author Dr Ahmed El-Sohemy of the University of Toronto in Canada.

For those with the slow-acting gene, two to three cups of coffee a day increased their odds of a heart attack by 36 per cent, and four or more cups a day increased the risk by 64 per cent, the study said. — Reuters

Trends
Security robot

Hitachi is working on an R2D2-like security robot on wheels that can map out its surroundings using infrared sensors and a camera to detect missing items, suspicious packages and intruders.

The 57-centimetre tall robot, which looks like a trash can and is reminiscent of the small, beeping robot in ‘’Star Wars’’ has a swivelling camera that protrudes like a periscope, enabling it to watch for suspicious changes in the landscape and send photos to a guard, Hitachi said today.

The Japanese electronics maker has no commercial product plans so far but believes the roving robot, which can figure out the best route to a spot on its own, is better than the stationary cameras now common for security, researcher Toshio Moriya said. — AP

Small brains, long memories

Although they have brains about the size of a grain of rice, hummingbirds have superb memories when it comes to food, according to research. No bird-brains these tiny creatures that weigh 20 grams (0.7 ounces) or less and feed on nectar and insects.

The research, reported in the journal Current Biology, suggests they not only remember their food sources but can plan with a certain amount of precision. ‘’To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that animals in the wild can remember both the locations of food sources and when they visited them,’’ said Susan Healy, of the University of Edinburgh. — Reuters

Smallest triceratops

With its big, hockey puck-sized eyes, shortened face and nubby horns, it was probably as cute as a button - at least to its mother, a three-horned dinosaur called Triceratops that could weigh as much as 10 tons and had one of the largest skulls of any land animal on the planet.

Visitors to the University of California, Berkeley’s Valley Life Sciences Building now can judge for themselves.

A cast of the foot-long skull from the youngest Triceratops fossil ever found is on display in the building’s Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library.

The actual skull, also at UC Berkeley and in fragments, is described by campus paleontologist Mark Goodwin in the March issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

THIS UNIVERSE
Prof Yash Pal

Why don’t birds forget their way in the sky?

We know that birds can find their way, not just in the area where they live. Some of them can navigate over thousands of kilometres, across deserts, snowy mountains and oceans and come to spend their winters in warmer places visited in earlier years.

Therefore, it seems that like us the birds also require two distinct capabilities.

1. One of these is to be able to navigate over long distances. We can now do that with road maps and also use the sun, the moon and the stars to find directions.

It seems surprising that birds also use similar celestial markers for their long excursions! It appears that many of them can also sense the direction of the earth magnetic field to orient themselves. This is much like the way hikers use a magnetic compass.

2. The second capability they and we both require is to be able to recognise or identify our destination after we arrive in its neighbourhood.

The elements that define their stored images and ours might be different, but there is no question that birds must be capable of storing imagery over long periods and possess the mental software not to be fooled by insignificant changes that might have occurred.

An airline pilot, or an astronaut is satisfied when after a long ocean spanning flight or an interplanetary journey he sights the lights on the home runway and the signal from the airflight controller on the ground.

The birds might also sense some information of that kind.

Yes, the birds are gifted in this regard. We have also acquired some similar capabilities but theirs are more self reliant and self-dependent, and more capable.

Birds have uncanny homing capabilities.

This might imply some sort of gift to store images on a string and a device to read that string backwards.

Or they might have more sophisticated processing facilities allowing them to take variable paths back home depending only on some critical landmarks.

Much of what I have said is only a plausible interpretation of what is known to me.

This may not be the only interpretation. I am sure there is still a lot that I, even others, do not know.