Scientists Discover Secret Weapon That Allows Pythons to Digest Bones

Pistons are famous for eating habits. After drowning their predators with their curves, this great snakes animal is intact. Now researchers have launched a new light on mobile mechanisms that allow you to digest all skeletons.

The study was presented in Belgium in Belgium in the Experimental Biology Society published In an experienced biology magazine, Burmese examined the intestinal cells of pythons. Mature men can grow in length of 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters) and allow them to impress feed A large number of mammals and birds, including deer and alligators. Unlike other carnivors that eat meat only, the snakes trust the skeletons of animal as a calcium source. Swallow the whole existing calcium from a skeleton, which can lead to this food into the bloodstream of the snake. Called HyperCalcemia, can lead Kidney failure in heart conditions, high blood pressure, bone imperfections and reptiles.

“We wanted to determine how we [pythons] Through the guts, the calcium managed to absorb this huge swallow and restricted, “said Jehan-Hervé Lignot, author and professor at the University of Montpellier, A statement.

For this purpose, Lignot and colleagues are one of the pythons that are one of three different diets: Rats enriched with calcium carbonate to match normal rats, bony rats or natural bone calcium levels. A group of snakes did not receive any of these diets and fasted to provide an initial three weeks. Nutrition of three to six days, researchers have broken down the snakes to euthanize people and remove their small intestines.

Afterwards, blood calcium and hormone levels, along with the measurements of the level and electronic microscopes, they analyzed the pyts and intestinal lining cells using pyts. This discovered a cell type unprecedentially that produces large particles made of calcium, phosphorus and iron. These particles are structures called Lignot “Speroids”.

“The morphological analysis of the python epithel has revealed the special particles I have never seen in other vertebrates,” he said Lignot. Colleagues and colleagues found these particles inside the internal “Crypt” – small pockets or gaps of special cells that differ from traditional intestinal cells. “Unlike normal absorbed enterocytos, these cells are very narrow, short microvilla [finger-like membrane protrusions]And there is a apical layer that forms a cryptist, “he said.

Three different diets ate pythons, allowed researchers to evaluate the function of this unique cells. In snakes who ate spellless prey, enterocytes did not produce calcium and phosphorus rich particles. All rodents or calcium are added to boneless rodents, but the pockets are crypts filled with large particles of calcium, phosphorus and iron. These cells have played an important role in breaking the bones of Pytho.

Although Burmese Pythons is first determined, this new cell type is not inherent. Since this initial discovery, researchers found these special bones in the Gila monster, which digested these special bones in other types of python, boot and Gila monster in the south-west of the United States and Mexico.

The findings point to the mineral regulatory system in digestive systems of reptiles. However, due to this mechanism, the beaked vultive, other types of animals such as shark and other sea predators, water mammals or raptors, with other types of bone-eating flushes. Gizmodo said that other researchers will inspire other researchers to search for these newly discovered cells in the animal world.