Frog Poison - Periodic Table of Videos

so this is a compound called per hydro histrionic toxin very difficult see actually it's just a tiny speck in there probably less than a milligram of this compound in this style and yet that'll be enough easily to kill a human being so it's an incredibly toxic out of the the nature's chemical warfare frogs have evolved all sorts of mechanisms to defend against predators and birds and what-have-you so this is one of the compounds like they can excrete when they're under attack so on the surface of the frog you get this gooey excretion if it's under attack it looks like a white foamy substance and these are only frogs which usually found in Latin America things on there are endangered species so we're not allowed one but here's my model of one but actually though they're even smaller than this so the frogs you get over in this country are fairly sizable these frogs are probably about the size of your thumbnail very very tiny very brightly colored so this one's blue but this is no an ear as bright as some of these frogs that's reds and yellows it's essentially screaming danger so when the the birds comes in it may be packet is cut the Frog needs something to act really quickly and over the millions of years they've developed these compounds and they actually act on the nervous system so like what they do is they paralyze the bird instantly so the bird is one minute about to have dinner the next minute is completely frozen like a statue and of course the frog can hop away the bird eventually dies of asphyxiation because it the lungs it all the breathing all those muscles everything gets paralyzed or go back to this again so it's probably just less than one milligram in here and you can you can't see it it's so small smell a speck of dust sort of size about three milligrams were first isolated from 1,100 frogs so you can see that these things these compounds are so potent that the frogs really don't need to make very much of this in all to be effective in their defense of the against you know multiple progresses when the Spanish in others French went out to the South America hundreds of years ago now when they were exploring of course say they turned up and I thought well the native people here just have bows and arrows or Spears these guys will be a walkover but of course they won't because well they had with poison darts so sometimes these frogs are called poison dart frogs or poison arrow frogs so what they would do that they would capture these frogs and these frogs only make this toxin when they're in the natural environment if you have them in captivity they don't have the right diet resource I can't make these molecules so these native Indians would go and they would keep them in a hollow tube and when they needed them they would take a spear or a dart and they'll put it down the mouth of the Frog to the other end to its leg and oddly enough that would make the Frog sweat quite a bit and you'll get all this white gooey excretion coming from the skin and you just take your arrows and you just swirl it around in this secretion and these arrows then would be poisonous for around about a year so this these compounds are quite stable entities quite stable compounds and of course what happened was the invaders came over and of course when they got shot with these darts or Spears with this poison on the tip they would be paralyzed just like the bird just like anything else so it birds are quite small humans are quite big still sub milligram quantities of this material is enough to paralyze indeed kill a human being so these are very potent compounds right well you can get it from frogs but if you remember I said 1,100 frogs will give you about 3 milligrams of this material we wanted to make these compounds in a synthetically viable way so you could make grams if you needed to to allow these further studies to go on these could also be potentially useful compounds for the treatment of pain maybe in the future certainly good lead compounds for study because pain messages you also go through the nervous system so this is this is this particular one molecule here so this is per hydro hysteretic a toxin and it's actually this is a synthetic compound so there's about fifteen of these compounds and it's just these two side chains which are different this core structure in the middle is always the same that the blue one here that's nitrogen this is a oxygen so this is a hydroxyl function here and it's the combination of these two and the exact spacing between these two which is key to why this molecule work so this mimics a natural neurotransmitter use to convey the message between two parts of the nervous system so you can think of a nervous system is an electrical cable and then you'll get a connector junction so imagine that two connectors coming together a plug in a socket now this the acetylcholine molecule transmits from the plug to the socket the spacing of these two functionalities here is absolutely key so these fit the key that acetylcholine normally would fit in to trigger the response if you are clumsy or indeed if you got shot by a poison arrow this gets into your bloodstream it can get immediately to the peripheral nervous system so that's all your muscles your hearts your lungs anything that moves in your body and it can block the receptors in those or block the the signals from your brain to your lungs for example to tell it to breathe in and out now you don't consciously think that you're doing that but your brain is a very clever thing it sets so many things on autopilot but it's constantly sending out messages many many hundreds a second to control what's going on in your body and this little molecule here and it would take just a few of these molecules to completely shut down those muscular neuro transmissions if you like if it got into your central nervous system in your spine in your brain it could completely wipe out any messages that are coming from your hands from any senses to your brain so in many ways that's why it could be very useful for pain management

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 351,272

Rating: 4.9045486 out of 5

Keywords: Histrionicotoxin, frog, poison, toxin, arrow, dart

Id: bqSeQuH_Tc4

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2010

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[u/significant_soldier]

Saxsaphone?