'Magical' royal bee jelly offers promise to combat cancer: Study
New York, July 23 : Royal jelly -- a natural bee product -- long known for its mysterious growth effects on future queen honey bees, while hailed by some as an anti-ageing, cholesterol-lowering super supplement, might also help fight cancer, finds new research.
Royal jelly also called "bee milk", looks like white snot. Besides water, it also contains a combination of proteins and sugars.
The findings showed this "queen magic" affects cell signalling and growth in cancer cells.
However, how this actually happens and its potential benefit to humans, has remained a mystery to scientists.
"The exact structure of the key protein in royal jelly remains unknown. But it is expected to act through the epidermal growth factor (or EGF) receptor -- the main pathway targeted by cancer therapeutics today," Daryl Klein, Assistant Professor at Yale University in Connecticut, US, said in a statement.
Klein's lab studies cell signalling, and how these signals can be "tuned" in different ways.
Using commercial jelly shipped from China, initial studies from Klein's lab have started to resolve the oligomer structure of MRJP-1 (major royal jelly protein).
However, the scientists found that resolution stalled around 11 Angstroms -- not enough to reveal the potential secrets hidden in the jelly.
They fear that the commercially available product may have been the limiting factor.
"We've bought commercial royal jelly, but it goes through a lot of handling -- freezing, thawing and re-freezing -- before it gets to us, which could affect the ultimate resolution we can see in this protein and how we can do functional tests on it," added Tongqing Li, post-doctoral associate at the varsity.
Researchers are now hoping to extract royal jelly from the university's campus to find out "how it modifies cell growth across different species, and how it might modify cancer cell signalling," Klein said.
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US VP JD Vance says Lebanon not part of ceasefire, calls it ‘misunderstanding’
Budapest/Washington: US Vice President J D Vance has said that Lebanon was never included in the ceasefire understanding with Iran, describing the confusion as a “legitimate misunderstanding”.
Speaking to reporters before departing from Hungary, Vance said, “I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn’t. We never made that promise.”
He stressed that the United States had not included Lebanon in the scope of the ceasefire at any stage.
His remarks come amid continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon, where more than 200 people were reported killed, even as ceasefire talks between Iran and the US move forward.
Vance said Israel had “offered … to check themselves a little bit in Lebanon because they want to make sure that our negotiation is successful”.
He warned that if Iran allows the situation in Lebanon to affect the negotiations, it could derail the talks.
“If Iran wants to let this negotiation fall apart in a conflict where they were getting hammered over Lebanon, which has nothing to do with them and which the United States never once said was part of the ceasefire, that’s ultimately their choice,” he said.
