We humans are better off eating as little sugar as possible. All those cakes, cookies and chocolate are making us fat, with all the consequences that entails. How different is that for the fruit bat. He can eat twice his body weight in sugary fruit every day. And it’s going well. How is that possible?
American scientists are there now found out and that can have positive consequences for the treatment of the more than one million Dutch people with diabetes. People with diabetes produce little or no insulin, which leads to problems with blood sugar levels. “But fruit bats have a genetic system that keeps blood sugar levels under control without ever failing,” explains researcher Nadav Ahituv of the UC San Francisco. “We now want to learn more from that system in order to find better insulin treatments for people.”
Lice life
This can be done, for example, by looking at the functioning of the pancreas. The fruit bat has a pancreas with extra cells that produce insulin. Furthermore, their kidneys work differently. They are better able to extract crucial electrolytes from their watery fruit meals.
In the meantime, the fruit bats are living a life of lice. They sleep twenty hours a day, wake up and then indulge in all kinds of delicious sweet fruit for four hours. Then it’s high time for a nap again. And the pancreas and kidneys can get to work processing all those goodies, so that the animals do not get diabetes.
A look into the DNA
To find out exactly how the animals do this, the researchers looked at genetic expression – which genes are switched on and off – and at DNA that controls gene expression in both fruit bats and big brown bats, which eat insects. To do this, they used a relatively new cell technology that can explain not only which types of cells are in which organs, but also how these cells regulate gene expression to keep the diet healthy.
A fruit bat busy with his favorite hobby. Photo: Muuraa
In fruit bats, the answer lay mainly in the pancreas and kidneys, which evolved to cope with the bat’s unhealthy diet. The pancreas not only has more cells that produce insulin, but it also produces more glucagon, which increases blood sugar levels if they drop too much. Meanwhile, the fruit bat’s kidneys have more cells to capture the scarce salts as they filter the blood. On the other hand, the big brown bat had more cells to break down proteins and store water. The gene expression in his cells was adjusted in such a way that he can process an insect diet well.
In the wild nature
“The organization of the DNA around the insulin and glucagon genes was very clearly different in the two bat species,” said researcher Wei Gordon. “The DNA surrounding genes has long been considered junk DNA (with no known function), but our data show that this regulatory DNA likely helps fruit bats deal with sudden increases or decreases in blood sugar levels.”
The researchers are impressed. “It’s special to move away from model animals, like the lab mouse, and discover possible solutions to human health crises in the wild,” Gordon said. “The bats have solved it and it’s all in their DNA, the result of natural selection.”
The superhero
Recently, there has been a growing interest in bats as objects of study to improve human health. The researchers traveled to Belize to participate in the annual Bat-a-Tohn with about fifty other bat researchers. They catch a number of wild bats there and conduct research in nature. One of the Jamaican fruit bats captured at that time was used for this study.
It is certainly not a bad idea to zoom in a little closer on the bat. Although the animal is hideous, it is one of the most diverse mammal species and whether it concerns its immune system or its strange diet: the animal has repeatedly proven to have all kinds of evolutionary cleverness. “Bats are basically superheroes, each with their own amazing superpower, whether that’s echolocation, flying, sucking blood without it clotting or eating fruit without getting diabetes,” Ahituv said. “And we’ve only just begun to discover all that.”
2024-01-09 12:35:32
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