Virginia Tech
Millipedes get a bad rap — their many legs put people off and could classify them as “creepy crawly.” But these anthropods’ secretions could hold the key to new drug discovery for the treatment of neurological diseases and pain.
Chemist Emily Mevers and her team recently discovered a new set of complex structures in millipede secretions that can modulate specific neuroreceptors in ant brains.
The newly discovered structures fall into a class of naturally occurring compounds called alkaloids. The Mevers team named them the andrognathanols and the andrognathines after the producing millipede, Andrognathus corticarius, found on Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus in Stadium Woods. These discoveries were recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
A new compound discovery
Mevers specializes in leveraging the chemistry of underexplored ecological niches, in this case the millipede, in the name of drug discovery…