Some bats eat huge amounts of sugar, but unlike humans, this does not cause health problems.
Too much sugar is bad for your health. It can lead to diabetes, obesity or even cancer, among other things. Surprisingly, fruit-eating bats don’t seem to be bothered by this at all, even though they eat double their body weight in sugary fruit every day. An international team of biologists describes it in the scientific journal Nature communications how this is possible.
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Other cells
To find out, the team compared the Jamaican fruit vampire to the big brown bat, which eats insects rather than fruit. The researchers examined which genes are active in both bat species. For this they used a fairly new technique that also allows them to see in which cells these genes are active.
This allowed them to see what types of cells are present in the 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 raises blood sugar levels. Thanks to these adaptations, fruit-eating bats can respond extremely quickly to fluctuations in blood sugar levels.
The kidneys also had a different composition than that of the big brown bat. They had more specialized cells to capture scarce salts from the aqueous fruit diet.
A fruit vampire from Jamaica. Image: Tobusaru, CC BY 3.0.
Other genes
The biologists then delved into the DNA of those cells. In both species, different genes were turned on or off. In fruit vampires, these were genes beneficial to a high-sugar fruit diet because they tightly regulate blood sugar levels. In the big brown bat, the genes were precisely adapted to a protein-rich insect diet.
New treatment for diabetes?
According to scientists, this is important information for diabetes research. “In diabetes, the human body is unable to produce or detect insulin, which leads to problems controlling blood sugar levels,” said Nadav Ahituv, one of the researchers. a press release. “But bats that eat a fruit-based diet have a genetic system that perfectly 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!
Image: Jobet Palmaira/Getty Images
2024-01-09 14:00:27
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