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Time and time again, scientists discover that old wive’s tales, fables, fairy tales, and sayings almost always have a figment of truth behind it – no matter how weird, disgusting, or far-fetched it sounds. Now, an article published by the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research provides proof that the Russian saying “if a frog jumps into a bucket of milk, it won’t go sour” is actually quite true.
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Organic chemist A.T. Lebedev of Moscow State University states that the common Russian Brown Frog has 76 different antibiotic peptides in its skin secretions. These secretions keep the frog safe, since its soft porous skin is so vulnerable to bacteria. The bacteria that frogs commonly fight are also found in milk, so in days gone by when an unlucky leaping frog landed in a bucket of milk, the farmers put two and two together when they noticed their milk would not sour. A.T. Lebedev tested this tale over and over again, and he came up with the same results.
This officially confirms what people have thought for centuries, and now new doors are opened into fighting our bacteria superbugs that have formed resistance to our current antibiotics.
“These peptides could be potentially useful for the prevention of both pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacterial strains,” wrote the researchers, “while their action may also explain the traditional experience of rural populations.”
Researchers are now working on trying to harvest the incredible antibiotics frogs naturally produce in order to create a medicine people can safely use.
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(via PetsLady)
Actually, this old wives’ tales has NO TRUTH behind it at all! The myth did NOT inspire the research, and the actual practice would not preserve milk at all. There is far too little peptide to pasteurize a pale of milk. Instead, it would result in a bloated frog corpse defecating toxic salmonella into the rapidly putrefying milk. This line of research was in fact begun in 1998 by Conlon et al. on North American and European frogs.
Read more: http://thephysicspolice.blogspot.com/2013/01/myth-russian-milk-frogging.html
Thank you for setting the record straight! I will notify my readers as soon as possible.