It is one of the world’s great natural sweeteners, totally organic, renewable and sustainable, and Canadian
Canada, and especially the province of Quebec, provides the vast majority of the world’s maple syrup, but now new Canadian research seems to indicate a remarkable new potential for it in the area of medicine.
Natalie Tufenkji (PhD) is associate professor of Chemical Engineering, and Canada Research Chair in Biocolloids and Surfaces at McGill University. She directed the research team that made an amazing new discovery in the fight against bacteria
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Professor Turenkji said her team wanted to explore the potential health- ie actual medicinal qualities of maple syrup.
The team was inspired by stories of North American aboriginal tribes who had long used maple syrup as one of many natural remedies to deal with infections.
To do this, they went to a local market and bought samples of typical maple syrup, they then reduced that by removing all the sugars and water to create a phenolic-rich extract.
The team then explored how certain common bacteria reacted to the extract alone, hoping that there would be some beneficial medicinal result as per native lore. The result however was not spectacular.
They then however tried the extract in combination with known antibiotics, Here the results were quite remarkable.
Bacteria have defences, which include an film “wall” as the bacteria community or infection grows. In addition each bacterial cell has its own membrane, and internal defences which can be equated as pumps to push out anything “undesirable” that makes it through the cell membrane.
As it turns out, the maple syrup phenols help to weaken the structure of the defensive “wall”, and the individual membrane. In addition they seem to deactive the internal pumps. What this means is that much more of the antibiotic can penetrate the community film and into individual bacterium cell, and because the antibiotic is not being pushed out, it can accomplish its task of defeating the bacterium.
In fact, when tested on four common bacteria which cause problems for humans, such as e-coli, and others, the team found that the same bacteria destroying effect of the antibiotics could be achieved with anywhere from one-half up to an amazing one-tenth of the amount of antibiotics when they were combined with the syrup’s phenolic-rich extract.
The scientists also found that the extract affects the gene expression of the bacteria, by repressing a number of genes linked with antibiotic resistance and virulence.
This potentially could greatly reduce the growing and extremely serious issue of anti-biotic resistant bacteria.
Professor Tufenkji points out their experiments are only in the very early stages and as with all such things, any developments for the public could be years away.
However, she does say that the team was both surprised and extremely pleased with their discovery and adds that this does provide a very exciting new area of medicinal research.
Funding came from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Research Chairs.
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