Cup Of Green Tea To Keep The Bacteria Away
Hi,
Here is something very interesting for tea skeptics. Scientists may soon confirm what Chinese have been swearing by for centuries, ‘Green tea helps kill germs’. Not that I am about to give up soap and start washing my hands with green tea but there are folks who may just want to do that.
Researchers from the National institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana, Slovenia discovered that green tea catechins inhibit essential bacterial enzyme DNA gyrase, which is the target of several existing clinically used drugs. Efficiency of green tea extract in oral hygiene has been known for centuries and this gave researchers a clue that antibacterial activity might be involved. A cup of green tea contains up to 200 mg of catechins, whose biological activity has been mainly attributed to its antioxidant activity. By the use of NMR spectroscopy, researchers from Slovenia have now pinpointed the ATP-binding site of DNA gyrase as target of EGCG, the most abundant catechin from the green tea extract. Up to now several compounds targeted against the ATP-binding site of bacteria gyrase have been known but couldn't be used as drugs due to their side effects on mammalian cells.
Lead researcher Roman Jerala, the head of the Laboratory of Biotechnology at NIC explains: "We can anticipate to avoid the problem of toxicity using the compounds based on the green tea catechins, which have centuries of established safety record in the human diet."
This finding may be used to develop even more potent antibacterial compounds. Results were recently published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
So what does all this mean in simple English? Well, I guess this means, ‘Green tea may be great for washing away those little bugs on your hands’. Who knows, someday, your doctor might prescribe a ‘green tea shower’, once a week. Chinese can’t be wrong after all. They have been drinking green tea for five thousand years to keep all sorts of bugs away.
Hey, don’t look at me, I just told you what these guys told me.
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