STRI says that the work supports the idea that "ecological and evolutionary theories about chemical defense in rainforest plants... can significantly improve the efficiency and lower the cost of drug discovery, when compared to a random screening approach."
Brightly-colored beetles or caterpillars feeding on a tropical plant may signal the presence of chemical compounds active against cancer and parasitic diseases, report researchers writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The discovery could help speed drug discovery.
Scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and other organizations collected beetles and caterpillars on plants that produce compounds with and without activity against various cancers and parasites. They found that insects showing warning coloration — bright colors and bold patterns — were significantly more common on plants that contained anti-cancer and anti-parasite compounds. There was no difference in abundance of plain-colored insects between plants with and without bioactivity.
"We just put two and two together," said Julie Helson, a student at McGill University when she did this work and now pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto, "We knew that brightly colored insects advertise to their predators that they taste bad and that some of them get their toxins from their host plants, but because other insects cheat by mimicking the toxic ones, we weren't sure if insect color was really going to work to identify plants containing toxins. It did!"
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