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Biofoams


ORSES...


Y FROGS and


to completion in about 20 minutes, an observation unprecedented in the animal kingdom.


Alan Cooper, professor of biophysical


chemistry, and his zoologist colleague Malcolm Kennedy at the University of Glasgow, UK, have shared a longstanding interest in the molecular mechanisms associated with these foam nests, which Kennedy first observed when supervising undergraduate field trips in Trinidad in the mid-1990s. Cooper and Kennedy started their investigations in 1997 with


Common Southern Asian tree frogs protect their spawn in a stable foam nest, which rapidly turns blue owing to the presence of the protein ranasmurfin


.


a grant for ‘innovative and speculative research’ from the Wellcome Trust, and have made much progress over the years – despite the fact that this interest was not the main focus of their research. Cooper and Kennedy have collected foam nests from exotic locations, including a graveyard in Trinidad and a fishing village on the Malaysian coast, making sure only to remove those that were already doomed, typically because the frogs had chosen a bad location. ‘The Malaysian foam nests are sticky


and usually found attached to walls, old water tanks, buckets or other structures overhanging stagnant water,’ Cooper explains. ‘Here we were fortunate enough to have a Malaysian graduate student, Rosalind Tan, whose grandmother, Aw Ai Fong, has a traditional family home and plantation in a fishing village in Terengganu, on the South China Sea coast. We stayed here for most of the sample collection. Aw Ai Fong speaks no English, but turned out to be a great frog hunter.’


Chemistry&Industry • November 2013 25


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