AMAZING! Then, again, as we all know, frogs are essential for our good health 🙂
Frog mucus might seem like the kind of flu remedy a witch doctor would suggest, but in the future, more respected medical professionals could be prescribing it. Researchers at Emory University have found that certain peptides excreted by frogs can fight off human flu strains, and they could be used as emergency stand-ins during flu outbreaks when regular vaccines aren’t available.
Made up of short chains of amino acids, peptides are essentially mini-proteins, and they perform a variety of functions in the body. Some peptides are antimicrobial, playing a role in an animal’s immune system, and although they generally only benefit the species that’s producing them, the Emory team wanted to see if these flu fighters could carry across to humans.
But it’s not a good idea to just go out licking frogs the next time you get the sniffles – of those four candidates, it appears only one may be safe for human use. In lab tests, the researchers exposed human red blood cells to the different peptides, and using electron microscopy found that three of them were toxic. The fourth, which the team dubbed “urumin,” was lethal to the flu but harmless to us.
Click here for the full story: http://newatlas.com/frog-slime-peptide-fight-flu/49081/#gallery
Chez Froggie 