Cardiff University fights MRSA with honey

University Stories

The healing power of honey has been known since biblical times and is still used as an antibiotic today.  Now Cardiff University is working with a team of experts to see if honey can help fight MRSA, the deadly hospital bacteria that is resistant to conventional antibiotics.bee

With the different flowers bees visit making honey with different healing properties the scope for finding new uses for honey is vast.   This has prompted the Welsh School of Pharmacy the National Botanic Garden of Wales and the Society for Applied Microbiology to team up with Cardiff University to test for the affect of honey against two of the most common hospital acquired infections antibiotic-resistant bacteria MRSA and Clostridium difficile.  

The study will base its research on samples provided by honey-makers across the country along with a list of plants near their beehives. It is hoped that a screening test developed at Cardiff University using a DNA profiling will identify the plants which contributed to the most powerful honeys.

Professor Les Baillie of the Welsh School of Pharmacy said: "A lot of drug development involves expensive laboratory screening of a huge variety of plant products, often without success. We’re hoping to cut out the middle man and let the bees do a lot of the hard work, guiding to us those plants which work. We’re hoping the public can provide us with as much home-made honey as possible – they could supply the vital breakthrough in fighting these bacteria."

The Botanic Garden has 14 beehives and an in-house bee keeper, Lynda Christie, who will provide key expertise in support of this project. Once the most potent honey's have been identified the team will then investigate the plants found in them honey for the potential to develop new drugs. T

Dr Natasha de Vere, National Botanic Garden of Wales, said: "We have nearly completed our Barcode Wales project to DNA barcode each of the 1143 flowering plants in Wales and are excited to be developing our first applications that use this fantastic resource. We can see which honeys have the best results against infectious diseases that affect humans and bees and use DNA bar-coding to identify the plants making the honey.

The joint university and botanical garden team will also be looking for honeys which help bees resist pests and bugs. In particular, they will test for resistance to the Varroa mite, which has caused a rapid decline in the UK bee population, and the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae, responsible for American Foulbrood, which is one of the most destructive of all bee diseases. Bee pollination is worth an estimated £100m to British agriculture every year, and it is vital to halt the fall in bee numbers.

Anyone who wants to contribute their honey to the research project should send a 200 gram pot with their address, postcode, and details of the plants their bees feed on to:

Jenny Hawkins,
Welsh School of Pharmacy,
Cardiff University,
Redwood Building
King Edward VII Avenue
Cardiff
CF10 3NB

University of Portsmouth find worlds dinkiest dinosaur

University Stories

University of Portsmouth palaeontologists have discovered a tiny dinosaur that could be the worlds smallest.

 

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The bird-like dinosaur that lived in the Mesozoic era as early as 250 million years ago, and believed to be the size of a magpie, was found by fossil hunter Dave Brockhurst at Ashdown Brickworks in East Sussex.   Dr Darren Naish and Dr Steve Sweetman who have analysed the fossil have concluded that the mini-dinosaur is a meat eating dinosaur which estimate measured just 33 and 40cm in length making it the smallest dinosaurs discovered from the Mesozoic era.

Dr Steve Sweetman said: "This is such an exciting find as it represents the smallest dinosaur we have yet discovered in the European fossil record. Originally it was identified as the vertebra of a snake but once I saw it I knew straight away it was far more likely to be the vertebra of a tiny theropod. My colleague Darren is a theropod expert so I borrowed the specimen, showed it to him, and we concluded that it was in fact a tiny adult theropod dinosaur."

The dinosaur, which has been named Ashdown maniraptoran after the brickworks, has been identified from only a single neck vertebra, which nevertheless contains enough information to show it was part of the large group that included all of the two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods.

Dr Naish said: "Determining the total length of the specimen from just a single bone is highly speculative, but we used two techniques to provide a rough estimate of size."

The palaeontologists were able to confirm that the remains came from a fully grown dinosaur because the main body of the neck vertebra is fully fused to the arch-shaped part of the vertebra that sits on top which indicates the mini-dinosaur was skeletally mature.

The methods used were complex, the first involving duplicating digital versions of the vertebra to make a complete neck.  This 'digital' neck was then positioned within the silhouette of a maniraptoran. This technique suggested a total length for the Ashdown maniraptoran of just 45 cm.

Dr Naish said: "This method is more art than science because it relies on the assumption that the silhouette is correct to begin with but it gives us a reasonable idea of roughly what length the specimen could have been."

The second method to estimate the size of the Ashdown maniraptoran also involved using the reconstructed digital neck, but this time with data from neck length of other maniraptorans.  This technique suggested a total length for the Ashdown maniraptoran of somewhere between 33 and 50 cm, with the lower being most likely.

The dinosaur-bearing rocks at the Ashdown Brickworks in East Sussex have yielded lots of other fossils including the remains of salamanders, frogs, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and various kinds of large dinosaur.