Alligator wounds are a remarkable thing. Within only 12-24 hours, gators' torn tissue begins a healing process that takes five days to start in humans. And even though gators swim in microbe-infested waters, their wounds almost never become infected. This healing ability caught the eye of Mark Merchant, a researcher at Lake Charles, Louisiana-based McNeese State University. "I just grew up fishing in gator country and was curious to learn about their immune system," he says. "I didn't set out to discover a new antibiotic."
In fact, Merchant found that gator leukocytes secrete small peptides capable of killing many of the microbes that modern antibiotics can't touch, including MRSA - a resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus thought to be responsible for 70% of the lethal infections contracted in US hospitals. He is part of a group of researchers turning to nature in search of proteins and peptides that kill deadly ...
