How do bats incubate the Corona virus without getting sick?
Bats adopt mechanisms that slow down the pace of aging. AFP
Bats are not popular animals, but they know how to avoid the effects of aging, and they incubate viruses such as Ebola or Corona without getting sick.
Every year, Emma Teeling, a genetics researcher at University College Dublin (UCD), and her team take bat blood samples and wing biopsies from churches or schools in western France, in the hope that their research into the secrets to the longevity of these flying mammals will benefit humans. .
"These experiments allow us to develop visions that help us live longer, healthier and better fight disease," says the scientist enthusiastically.
The longevity of bats is remarkable for small mammals of this size.
In nature, “the life expectancy of an animal can often be predicted based on its size.
Small species grow quickly and die early, like mice, while larger ones grow slowly and live longer, like bowhead whales,” Tilling explains to AFP.
However, "bats are unique, they are one of the smallest mammals, but they can live for amazing periods," according to the researcher.
A large mouse bat, less than eight centimeters in size, may live 10 or even 20 years.
In 2005, researchers in Siberia caught a Brandt mouse bat that had been marked 41 years earlier, meaning it lived 10 times longer than expected for its size.
Emma Teeling admits, "Bats seem to have mechanisms that slow down the rate of aging" to the point where it's almost impossible to tell an animal's age when it becomes an adult.
To eliminate any doubt, the Dublin team draws on the program of the NGO Protany Vivant, which provides large, young mouse bats with responsive messengers.
These slides allow the age of each recaptured animal to be known over the years in order to subsequently analyze the different biological indicators of aging in blood samples from these mammals.
One of these indicators is telomeres, which are small pieces of DNA on the tip of a chromosome that shrink as the cell multiplies.
But this is not the case for large mouse bats.
"The telomeres of these bats do not shrink with age, which means that they can protect their DNA," says Emma Teeling.
Over time, it also enhances its ability to repair its DNA.”
Another intriguing axe of research is that these mammals carry several viruses without contracting the disease “and are able to adapt their immune response.”
And the Covid-19 epidemic revealed that an excessive inflammatory flare that plays a major role in the emergence of severe cases of Covid-19 in humans is due to a “cytokine outburst” that patients experience days after the appearance of initial symptoms.
As for bats, they know how to “balance the antiviral response with the anti-inflammatory response.
And if a human with a bat's metabolic system is taken to hospital, his condition will never require a respirator,” according to the researcher.
Emma Teeling, who leads the project to identify the genomes of 1,400 species of bats, and other researchers in the world are seeking to develop tools that allow humans to take advantage of the advantages of bats.
The idea is not to “manipulate human genes or create a human and a bat, but rather to find ways that allow us to control the interaction of our genes to get the same results,” says the researcher, who hopes to find medical applications within 10 years or less.
It is also not a question of attaining immortality, “everything is spent in the end”, in the words of Teeling, who stresses that “what distinguishes bats is not eternal youth but their ability to live longer and in good health”, without cancers or diseases associated with ageing.
Follow our latest local and sports news and the latest political and economic developments via Google news