Herps and Medicine: Lizard locomotion, snakes relieving pain

As we age, our ability to move and get around changes. One researcher is looking to lizards to help develop therapy aids for the elderly who need to rebuild their balance. From Newswise.com:

But what are these built-in control mechanisms and how do they work? Hsieh believes the answers lie in the locomotion of some 130 lizards she has been studying in her lab, particularly basilisk lizards — nicknamed “Jesus lizards” because they can run across water — and baby frilled dragons from Australia. “On the most basic level the answer is balance,” said Hsieh. “If these animals can’t maintain their balance, they cannot escape from predators, find food or even mate and reproduce.” But Hsieh wants to understand how these lizards maintain that balance and quickly recover from slip perturbations while navigating changing environmental conditions such as narrow surfaces, smooth surfaces, slippery surfaces, granular surfaces and even surfaces that vary in height. [....] “There are a lot of hypotheses on why the elderly fall more,” she said. “Some say that as you get older, your reflexes slow or the springy tendons in your body become less springy. We can’t get at this age question, but instead use these lizards to elucidate the mechanisms that help a younger animal recover quickly when it begins to fall. We can then apply that knowledge towards improving therapy options or modifying environmental design for the elderly.”

The use of Cobra venom in pain relievers is fairly well-known, but another snake's venom is being looked at as a possible help.

As researchers continue to focus on the study of Texas Coral snake venom, they aim to search new lead and new insights into pain perception and targets for pain management. Researchers are much interested in determining how natural toxins effect. David Julius, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco and his team decided to test snake venoms because of its ability to response with pain. They used samples of various kinds of venoms to rat neurons and measured the results on how strongly the nerves fired. Positive results were seen on Texas coral snake, a shy but deadly species and lives in southern areas of United States.

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