Some fruit bats eat as much as twice their physique weight in sugary mangoes, bananas, or figs every single day to not solely survive, however thrive. Unlike people, these flying mammals can have an primarily everlasting candy tooth and don’t develop some of the unfavourable well being penalties resembling diabetes. A examine printed January 9 within the journal Nature Communications discovered that genetic variations have helped preserve their sugary diets from turning into dangerous.
[Related: How do bats stay cancer-free? The answer could be lifesaving for humans.]
The examine may have future implications for treating diabetes, which impacts an estimated 38 million Americans, in line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is the eighth main trigger of demise within the United States and the main trigger of kidney failure, lower-limb amputations, and grownup blindness.
“With diabetes, the human body can’t produce or detect insulin, leading to problems controlling blood sugar,” examine co-author and University of California, San Francisco geneticist Nadav Ahituv mentioned in a press release. “But fruit bats have a genetic system that controls blood sugar without fail. We’d like to learn from that system to make better insulin-or sugar-sensing therapies for people.”
Fruit bats vs. insect bats
Every day, fruit bats get up after about 20 hours of sleep and feast on fruit earlier than returning again to their caves, bushes, or human-built buildings to roost. To work out how they can eat a lot sugar and thrive, the workforce on this examine targeted on how the bat pancreas and kidneys developed. The pancreas is an belly organ that controls blood sugar.
Researchers in contrast the Jamaican fruit bat with an insect-eating bat known as the large brown bat. They analyzed the gene expression–which genes had been switched on or off–and regulatory DNA that controls gene expression. To do that, the workforce measured each the gene expression and regulatory DNA current in particular person cells. These measurements present which sorts of cells primarily make up the bat’s organs and in addition how these cells regulate the gene expression that manages their weight loss plan.
They discovered that the compositions of the pancreas and kidneys in fruit bats developed to accommodate their sugary weight loss plan. The pancreas had extra cells to supply insulin, a necessary hormone that tells the physique to decrease blood sugar. It additionally had extra cells that produce one other sugar-regulating hormone known as glucagon. The fruit bat kidneys had extra cells to entice scarce salts and electrolytes as they filter blood.
Changes in DNA
Taking a better take a look at the genetics behind this, the workforce noticed that the regulatory DNA in these cells had developed to modify the suitable genes for fruit metabolism on or off. The insect-eating large brown bats had extra cells that break down protein and preserve water and the gene expression in these cells was calibrated to deal with a weight loss plan of bugs.
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“The organization of the DNA around the insulin and glucagon genes was very clearly different between the two bat species,” examine co-author and Menlo College biologist Wei Gordon mentioned in a press release. “The DNA around genes used to be considered ‘junk,’ but our data shows that this regulatory DNA likely helps fruit bats react to sudden increases or decreases in blood sugar.”
While some of the fruit bat’s biology resembled what’s present in people with diabetes, the bats will not be identified to have the identical well being results.
“Even small changes, to single letters of DNA, make this diet viable for fruit bats,” mentioned Gordon. “We need to understand high-sugar metabolism like this to make progress helping the one in three Americans who are prediabetic.”
Studying bats for human well being
Bats are one of essentially the most numerous households of mammals and the whole lot from their immune programs to very explicit diets are thought-about by some scientists to be examples of evolutionary triumph. This examine is one of latest examples of how learning bats may have implications for human well being, together with in most cancers analysis and virus prevention.
For this examine, Gordon and Ahituv traveled to Belize to take part in an annual Bat-a-Thon, the place they took census of wild bats and area samples. One of the Jamaican fruit bats that they captured on the Bat-a-Thon was used to review sugar metabolism.
“For me, bats are like superheroes, each one with an amazing super power, whether it is echolocation, flying, blood sucking without coagulation, or eating fruit and not getting diabetes,” Ahituv mentioned. “This kind of work is just the beginning.”