Page 29Joint effort: Dr Sarah Pitt ran new tests on snails after spotting a flaw in her husband’s methodsBreakthrough from scientist who
re-ran tests to prove husband wrong
a sciENTisT hit on a By Inderdeep Bains
breakthrough in antibiotics- while trying to prove her
husband wrong.
Dr sarah Pitt watched her
biologist husband Dr alan
Gunn toil over an experiment
to find out why snails never
fall ill, even in bacteria-rid-
den gardens.
But when Dr Pitt noticed a flaw
in her husband’s lab methods, she
re-ran the tests and went on to
successfully identify antibacterial
properties in the snail slime.
and the unexpected discovery,
which came after testing on snails
from the couple’s garden, could
help develop new medicines to
treat patients with deep burn
wounds and lung infections.
Dr Pitt, who is a lecturer at the
university of Brighton, said: ‘my
husband is an invertebrate biolo-
gist and i am the microbiologist in
the family and we played to our
respective strengths.
‘He started testing the frothy
mucus snails secrete as a defence
against bacteria.
‘He thought something interest-
ing might be happening, but when
i discussed his lab methods it was
clear he was doing it all wrong. so
i did what wives tend to do and
said “you are doing that all wrong- give it to me and i’ll sort it out”,
which i did.’
she added: ‘it was chance, really.
i don’t think either of us expected
anything much to come of it.’
Researchers have long suspected
snail mucus contains antibacte-
rial properties but experiments
have been inconclusive until now.
spurred on by their professional
effective against a germ called
pseudomonas aeruginosa. This
germ causes lung infections in
patients with cystic fibrosis.
Working with colleagues at
King’s college london, Dr Pitt
separated the snail slime proteins,
known as protein fractions, into
smaller chunks.
she said: ‘We found that frac-
tions containing some smallerproteins also worked against the
bacteria, something we were not
expecting at all, based on our pre-
vious results.’
Dr Pitt and husband Dr Gunn, a
professor at liverpool John
moores university, then teamed
up to assess the proteins’ genetic
code and found her discovery was
a world first. Dr Pitt, who pub-
lished her study in the BritishJournal of Biomedical science,
said: ‘matching [the proteins]
with the international database of
proteins, we found that no one
had reported them before, so they
are newly identified by us.’
The microbiologist is now work-
ing to make the proteins artifi-
cially in the lab which could help
in the development of a new anti-
bacterial cream.I’ve snailed it!
‘Played to our
strengths’rivalry, Dr Pitt was able to improve
her husband’s method and iden-
tify proteins in the snails’ slime.
These proteins could help to
develop new medicines, including
an antibiotic cream to treat deep
burn wounds and an aerosol for
lung infections in patients with
cystic fibrosis.
in her study, Dr Pitt, who is also
a chief examiner at the institute
of Biomedical science, tested
frothy mucus from the snails and
found proteins in the slime wereDaily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019
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