2024-01-27 06:00:27
After the pandemic, the scientific interest in bats has been triggered. Apart from being the ideal guests of coronavirus, there is no shortage of other reasons to pay attention to them. They are animals that display an unparalleled diversity of behaviors and resources.
They have adapted to the five continents. They live everywhere, except at the poles. Its various species eat from blood to pollen, fish or carrion. Son the only flying mammals. They represent a fifth of mammals. “For me they are superheroes: they are so diverse and have many different abilities,” he says. Nadav Ahituva geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco.
“We are a relatively new species. Maybe we can find solutions to our problems in species that have solved them before,” he adds. Jordi Serra Cobobiologist from the University of Barcelona.
Chiropterans addicted to sweets
Ahituv and his team set out to do exactly this when they posed a very simple question that is the basis of an article published in ‘Nature Communications’: why are fruit-eating bats capable of taking on an enormous amount of sugar and, without embargo, they don’t become diabetic?
Los fruit bats They are species that take refuge in trees, eat their fruits, and usually have large wingspan, up to 1.70 meters with wings spread. “It had already been proposed that bats were a model of diabetes, but no one had looked at it in detail at the genetic level,” he says. Wei Gordonprofessor of biology at Menlo College, in California, and first author of the research.
The group analyzed the entire genome of two species of bats with two different diets: the Jamaican fruit bat (A Jamaican artist) and the brown bat (Eptesic brown), which is insectivorous.
Differences in pancreas and kidneys
The experts analyzed four specimens of each species, and found suggestive differences in the pancreas and kidneys. The pancreas is precisely the organ that regulates blood sugar through hormones such as insulin and the glucagon. Fruit bats have many more cells that produce these hormones than insectivores.
In addition, their DNA is folded in such a way that the “switches” of the genes that trigger the production of these substances are much more accessible to the cellular machinery. “Despite a diet very rich in sugar, this system allows it to be kept balanced in the blood,” observes Gordon.
Another potential problem with the diet of fruit bats is that The fruit has few salts. But the researchers found that their kidneys They have a density of cells and certain genes that allow them dilute your urine a lot, reducing the loss of salts through this route. “Frugivorous bats have to excrete a lot of waterbecause there is a lot of it in the fruit, but they have to retain the few electrolytes [sales] contained in it,” explains Gordon.
The findings were possible thanks to a technique, integrative single cell sequencing, which allows the genetic information of each organ to be analyzed cell by cell and not how it used to be done previously, grinding the organ and extracting the information from the whole.
Model for humans?
Gordon relates that in the draft of his work they included regions of the human genome related to diabetes that bore a suggestive resemblance to those of bats. However, that part was remembered by the reviewers because doing correspondences between genomes of such different animals It’s too risky.
But Gordon and Ahituv want to pursue the idea of whether the specific mutations in those bats have a functional relevance in diabetes. They are intrigued by the fact that there are genetic aspects of diabetic patients that are very similar to fruit bats. “The difference, then, has to be in the switches”, affirms Ahituv.
“If we find genes from fruit bats that have a very high expression, therapies could be imagined to also overexpress them in humans with diabetes,” he ventures. At the moment, they plan to modify cells and mice to explore the role of the genetic information they have found.
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Another pending issue is that the study focuses only on one species of fruit bats, which in turn is part of the family “The new World” (America). But there are also fruit-eating bats in the “The old world” (especially Asia and Africa), which evolved this capacity independently of the former. Studying the variety of species and the two families is quite a challenge, due to the material difficulty of searching for and capturing bats.
“It does not surprise me that new evolutionary mechanisms are found in bats: they are unique mammals, with particular adaptations. For example, they survive many infections,” says Serra Cobo, not involved in the study. “They have adapted to very different places and to obtain very diverse food resources: it does not surprise me that the species has found solutions in the face of diabetes,” he adds. However, the expert calls for caution. “This work opens a path to explore. There is still a long way to go to draw definitive conclusions,” he concludes.
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