A recent discovery offers hope for the treatment of drug -resistant strains of bacteria jeopardizing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

The majestic Sweet Chestnut tree could be the key to halting a modern scourge.

Drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA ) has vexed the medical community for decades. Among the medical hazards, the bacterium known as staph comprises the immune systems of hospital patients, thereby prolonging the healing process. Once contracted, the pathogen is difficult to eradicate through the conventional use of antibiotics. Patients infected with the so-called "superbug" can suffer from a broad array of medical complications, ranging from a mild rash to amputation, and sometimes even death.

Health experts …show more content…
Ethnobotanists combine the study of indigenous cultures with botany to understand the many ways humans use plants to survive. Trained as a medical ethnobotanist, Quave unites her interest in traditional knowledge with scientific inquiry to unlock the secrets of plants. “I like going to more isolated places because people engage with Nature for their own survival,” she said.

Tree of Life

She’s gathered hundreds of species plants that might lead to new drug discoveries; the sweet chestnut tree is among them. Castanea sativa is a species of broad- leaved chestnut tree with a long history in Europe dating back two thousand years to the Roman Empire. Once prized by farmers and arborists throughout Europe and the United States for their shade and nutritional value they’re now consumed as a seasonal delicacy.

Quave conducts much of her field research in the isolated corners of Southern Europe, where she records the accounts of folk healers living in Italy, Sicily and Albania. “My PhD was focused on documenting the traditional uses of wild plants for the management of skin disease,” she said. It was their knowledge of the medicinal plants located in the Italian countryside that led Quave to the chestnut tree. According to Quave, villagers used chestnut leaves to makes a topical rinse in order to alleviate skin …show more content…
Plants are Nature’s sorcerers. Since they can’t fight or flee predators, or wander off in search of mates, they produce a brew of chemical compounds designed to fend off pests and to attract pollinators in order to enhance their survival. In turn, when humans consume these plants along with the chemical cocktails that they produce, the body may react in several ways; the substances we ingest may prove to be poisonous, hallucinogenic or even therapeutic.

“The whole concept of natural products research is to take advantage of the defense molecules that plants, fungi and bacteria are making to protect themselves to protect us, ”said Nadja Cech, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina, in the United States. Approximately 70 percent of the anti-infective drugs in use today are based on natural product sources. “There’s a lot of excitement in this field right now because people are realizing that there is great potential for natural products for drug discovery. We haven’t fully tapped into that,” she