The Swedish botanist and zoologist had a real penchant for naming things, and single-handedly invented the binomial classification system that we have today. But one man took it to a whole new level: Carl Linnaeus. See, humans have always tried to categorize animals because, well, we like categorizing. BEBES! NSW DPIīear with me here, because I know that phylogenetics and biological definitions might not seem like the most interesting thing about an animal with venomous spurs that sweats milk. Platypuses defy every category we try to shove them into-and that’s actually the coolest thing about them. Or, as one of the lead scientists on this study said in a press release: “Platypus are such weird animals that it would make sense for them to have weird biochemistry.”Īnd she’s not wrong. But the potential usefulness of this milk protein just seems to jive with everything else that we know about platypuses. To do so, scientists would need to somehow introduce the protein to an antibiotic resistant bacteria, then sit back to watch the carnage (hopefully) unfold. In that paper they hypothesized that, due to its unique structure, the protein might also function differently from our current antibiotics, and that this difference in functionality might mean it can kill bacteria that other drugs can’t.īut let’s keep in mind that no one has actually demonstrated that yet. They published their results in the wildly popular journal Structural Biology Communications. The Australian researchers who found the protein dubbed it the ‘Shirley Temple,’ because it has ringlets and scientists like giving things funny, cutesy names. This protein has a highly unusual structure not seen elsewhere in nature (that we know of). Here’s the deal: so far, we know that platypus milk is capable of killing bacteria and other microbes thanks to an antibacterial protein. But here’s what we do know: they’re definitely weird enough to pull off a feat like that. You may have heard that platypuses are going to save us from antibiotic resistance.
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