Some bats eat immense amounts of sugar, but unlike humans, this does not cause any health problems.
Too much sugar is bad for your health. It can lead to diabetes, obesity or even cancer, among other things. Remarkably, bats that eat fruit don’t seem to be bothered by this at all, even though they eat twice their body weight in sugary fruit every day. An international team of biologists describes in the scientific journal Nature Communications how that is possible.
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Other cells
To find out, the team compared the Jamaica fruit vampire with the big brown bat, which eats insects rather than fruit. The researchers looked at which genes are active in both bat species. For this they used a fairly new technique that also makes it possible to see in which cells those genes are active.
This allowed them to see which types of cells are present in organs. For example, they saw that the pancreas of fruit vampires had many more cells that produced insulin, a substance that lowers blood sugar levels. There were also extra cells that produce glucagon, a substance that actually increases blood sugar levels. Thanks to these adaptations, fruit-eating bats can respond extremely quickly to fluctuations in their blood sugar levels.
The kidneys also had a different composition than those of the big brown bat. They had more cells specialized for capturing scarce salts from the watery fruit diet.
A Jamaica fruit vampire. Image: Tobusaru, CC BY 3.0.
Other genes
The biologists then zoomed in on the DNA in those cells. In both species, different genes were turned on or off. In the fruit vampires, these were genes that are beneficial for a sugar-rich fruit diet because they tightly regulate blood sugar levels. In the big brown bat, the genes were precisely tailored to a protein-rich insect diet.
New treatment for diabetes?
According to the scientists, these are important insights for diabetes research. “In diabetes, the human body cannot produce or detect insulin, leading to problems controlling blood sugar levels,” said Nadav Ahituv, one of the researchers in a press release. “But bats on a fruit diet have a genetic system that flawlessly controls blood sugar levels (despite large amounts of sugar, ed.). We would like to learn from this to create better insulin therapies for people with diabetes.”
Sources: Nature Communications, UCSF via EurekAlert!
Beeld: Jobet Palmaira/Getty Images
2024-01-09 14:00:27
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