Medicinal Implications? Dubuque Professor Helps Discover Living Bacteria in Venom

When most people think of venom, they think of a toxic cocktail of death, usually delivered by fangs of some kind. Scientists, on the other hand, see venom as a means to new medicines and scientific breakthroughs. In fact, a local professor from the University of Dubuque is leading the way with some incredible findings when it comes to, get this, scorpion venom.

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According to the press release from the University of Dubuque, researchers carefully collected venom from two scorpion species and used advanced DNA sequencing. They discovered that venom can actually contain living bacterial communities. These bacteria survive and persist in venom despite extreme chemical stress and a lack of nutrients. These conditions would kill most microbes almost instantly. Each scorpion species studied had its own distinct group of bacteria, suggesting this is a biological pattern at work.

Big shout-out to UD Professor of Biology Adam Kleinschmit, PhD, who was part of a collaborative research team that published these new findings, challenging a long-standing assumption that animal venom is fully sterile.

Why does that matter to everyday people?

One major reason is our advancing medical industry. Bacteria that survive in harsh environments often produce special chemicals to protect themselves. Those chemicals can sometimes be turned into antibiotics, which are badly needed as more infections stop responding to existing drugs. Many of the antibiotics we rely on today originally come from microbes, and scientists are running out of easy places to look for new ones. Turns out, venom may be one of those untapped resources.

This research could also help scientists design tougher medicines and enzymes that work under extreme conditions, such as high acidity or chemical stress. That has implications for everything from treating disease to improving industrial processes and even preserving biological materials.

On top of that, the discovery changes how scientists think about venom itself. Instead of seeing it as just a chemical weapon, researchers are beginning to understand venom as a small but complex biological system shaped by interactions between animals, microbes, and the environment.

“Bioinformatics harnesses computation tools to organize, process, and analyze large biological datasets. For this microbial ecology project, we specifically used computer-based tools to interact with a large dataset of DNA sequences that allowed us to identify which microbes were present and their relative abundance in scorpion venom. Our research further shifts the traditional paradigm that venom is sterile due to the presence of antimicrobial peptides and toxins to thinking of venom as a microbial ecosystem that happens to be inhospitable for most organisms. In fact, it is possible that these venom microbes may play a role in generating and/or modifying venom compounds, an area of active venom biology research.”

-Adam Kleinschmit, PhD, University of Dubuque Professor of Biology

This is a big reminder that important discoveries don’t only come from major labs. Sometimes, they come from a curious mind at a Dubuque college, asking a simple question. He just so happened to follow the answer to the desert and back again.