Among fruit bats, Consume twice your body weight in mangoes, bananas, and figs every day Not just to survive, but to thrive. Unlike humans, these flying mammals can essentially have a permanent sweet tooth, without causing any negative health effects such as diabetes.a The study was published on January 9 in the journal nature communications They discovered that genetic adaptations help prevent their sweet diet from becoming harmful.
[Related: How do bats stay cancer-free? The answer could be lifesaving for humans.]
This research may have implications for diabetes treatment in the future. An estimated 38 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).it is 8th most common cause of death It is a leading cause of kidney failure, limb amputation, and adult blindness in the United States.
“When you have diabetes, your body can’t produce or detect insulin, which causes problems with blood sugar control,” says study co-author Nadav Ahitub, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. said in a statement. “But fruit bats have a genetic system that reliably controls blood sugar levels. We hope to learn from that system and develop better insulin or sugar-sensing therapies for people.”
Fruit bats vs. insect bats
Fruit bats wake up after about an hour each day. 20 hours sleep I will eat the fruit and then go home. A roosting cave, tree, or human-built structure. To understand how bats are able to eat so much sugar and grow, the team focused on how their pancreas and kidneys evolved. The pancreas is Abdominal organ that controls blood sugar levels.
Researchers compared the Jamaican free-tailed bat to an insect-eating bat called the big brown bat.they analyzed gene expression– which genes are switched on or off – and the regulatory DNA that controls gene expression. To do this, the team measured both gene expression and regulatory DNA present in individual cells. These measurements reveal which types of cells primarily make up the bat’s organs and how these cells regulate gene expression that governs feeding.
They found that the composition of the fruit bat’s pancreas and kidneys had evolved to adapt to a sweet diet. The pancreas had more cells that produce insulin, an essential hormone that tells the body to lower blood sugar levels. There were also many cells that produced another sugar-regulating hormone called . glucagon. The fruit bat kidneys had more cells to capture missing salts and electrolytes when filtering blood.
changes in DNA
Digging into the genetics behind this, the research team discovered that regulatory DNA within these cells had evolved to switch on and off the appropriate genes for fruit metabolism. The large brown insect-eating bats had many cells that broke down proteins and conserved water, and the gene expression of these cells was tuned to accommodate the insect diet.
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“The composition of the DNA around the insulin and glucagon genes was very clearly different between the two bat species,” says study co-author Way Gordon, a biologist at Menlo College. stated in a statement. “The DNA surrounding genes was once thought to be ‘junk’, but our data suggest that this regulatory DNA may help fruit bats respond to sudden increases or decreases in blood sugar levels. It shows that there is a gender.”
Some of the ecology of fruit bats is similar to that seen in humans with diabetes, but it is not known whether bats experience the same health effects.
“Small changes to one letter of the DNA make this food viable for fruit bats,” Gordon said. “We need to understand this high sugar metabolism to help the 1 in 3 Americans with prediabetes.”
Bat research for human health
Bats are one of the most diverse families of mammals, and some scientists believe that everything from their immune systems to their highly specialized diets are examples of evolutionary triumphs. The study is one of the latest examples of how bat research can impact human health, including cancer research and virus prevention.
For this research, Gordon and Ahitub traveled to Belize. annual batonThere, they conducted population surveys and field samples of wild bats. One Jamaican free-tailed bat captured at Bat-a-Thon was used to study glucose metabolism.
“For me, bats are like superheroes, each with amazing superpowers such as echolocation, flight, sucking blood without clotting, and eating fruit without getting diabetes,” Ahitub said. Ta. “These efforts are just beginning.”
