时差N小时:移除大肠毒素分子

It's three in the morning and you're awakened out ofa deep sleep by a terrible pain in the gut. Was itsomething you ate? And then it hits you—thatburger you had the other day was a littleundercooked. And there have been several cases ofe-coli poisoning reported in your area.

凌晨3点，熟睡中的你突然被胃部剧烈的疼痛弄醒。是因为吃坏肚子了吗?然后你想到昨天吃的汉堡有点生。这附近也报道过几起因大肠杆菌引起中毒的事件。

If you do have e-coli toxins coursing through yourbloodstream, the symptoms can be distressing,particularly the bloody diarrhea. And, unfortunately, there's no antidote. All you can do is waitit out. But that may change. Scientists at the University of Alberta, in Canada, have engineereda molecule to seek out e-coli toxins in the blood and flush them out of the system.

如果你血液里含有大肠杆菌，你会出现疼痛的症状，尤其会出现带血的腹泻。不幸的是，没有解药。你能做的只有坐等情况好转。但情况也许有变。加拿大艾伯塔大学的科学家们研制出一种分子，这种分子能搜索出血液里大肠杆菌，并将它们稀释排出体外。

The molecule works like a kind of molecular barb: it cruises around in the blood, and when itfinds an e-coli toxin it snags the toxin and attaches it to an immune system protein. Theprotein then neutralizes the toxin. So far the molecule has been tested in mice and beenfound to be effective.

这种分子的作用类似于鱼钩：它在血液里四处巡游，一旦找到大肠杆菌，就用凸起绊住并将它粘附在免疫蛋白上。然后免疫蛋白将毒素中和掉。目前为止，这种分子已经在老鼠身上试验过，效果很显著。

But because e-coli poisoning is relatively rare, it's unlikely that the molecule will be used tomanufacture a marketable drug any time soon. The research is still useful, though, because itmodels a promising way to treat a potentially wide range of bacterial infections. Forexample, the e-coli toxin is shaped similarly to the cholera toxin. So there could be a molecularsolution to treating cholera—a disease that affects millions of people around the world.

但是因为大肠杆菌中毒现象相对很少见，所以将这种分子大规模制成药物推向市场，还不太可能。但是这项研究仍然有用，因为它塑造了一种有效的方式来治疗各种各样的病毒感染。例如，大肠杆菌与霍乱病毒的形状类似。全球有数百万人感染上霍乱病毒，因此也可以研发出相应的分子，来治疗霍乱。