Miguel Bronchud, Veteran Cancer Clinician, Researcher, Co-Founder and ex Advisory Board at Regenerative Medicine Solutions, shared on LinkedIn:
“Frogs / biology – A deadly fungal infection that has caused massive frog extinctions can be prevented by anti fungal antibiotics produced by tadpoles before their skin produces keratin
‘One Fungus Has Caused More Extinctions Than Any Other Infectious Disease. Some Toads Have Found a Way to Survive It?’
Somehow, though, a few toad populations in the Pyrenees have managed to survive, in spite of their B. dendrobatidis infections.
The world, entire species of frogs and toads are being wiped out by a relentless fungal infection, commonly known as the chytrid fungus. For most amphibians, the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is a death sentence.
The researchers compared recently metamorphosed toads from these lakes in the Spanish/French Pyrenees with those from a population that has been doing much worse: the toads at Lac d’Arlet. Midwife toads across the Western Pyrenees have been nearly wiped out by chytrid infections, ever since the fungus reached the region 19 years ago.
Some populations of midwife toads (Alytes obstetricans) in these Pyrenees mountains deploy an immune defence against the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) earlier in their life cycle than others, which enables them to cope with infection.
Researchers from England have found that resistant toads begin to secrete antimicrobial peptides from their skin while they’re still tadpoles, where individuals that succumb to Bdinfections produce it only as fully-grown toads. This early defence allows tadpoles to fend off the fungus before their skin contains keratin, a protein that Bd requires to take hold, which toads only produce on their skin in adulthood.
I have always been a friend of frogs. In the remote Aragon village of Sarrión (Teruel) where I spent virtually all of my summers in my childhood and adolescence in the 1960s I used to spend hours watching and studying frogs (alive) in the ‘balsa de las ranas’ (frogs pond) where their amazing metamorphosis was probably the earliest stimulus I felt to study biology. Including some ‘early experiments’…
Many years after I met Sir John Gurdon (Nobel Laureate then , 1978/80) at MRC Cambridge University, or his then PhD student Doug Melton (later professor of embryology and developmental biology at Harvard) who cloned frogs and helped to determine several magic molecular cascades of key morphogenetic substances and information fields.
Luigi Galvani discovered in Italy (Bologna) in the 1780s that dead frog legs twitched when touched with metal. This led him to propose the theory of ‘ animal electricity’, which later helped inspire the invention of the electric battery.”