Sneeze into a tissue this cold season and marvel at the mucus your body has created to try to protect you from infection.
What if you could enhance your mucus, altering it so that tiny nano-sized pathogens did not even fit through, while on the outside the mucus seemed exactly the same?
A Homewood research team drawn from the labs of Samuel Lai, Richard Cone, Denis Wirtz and Justin Hanes may have discovered a way to do this. The medical applications of the new nanotechnology may be vast.
"Depending on the mucosal surfaces (i.e. the lung, GI tract, female reproductive tract, etc.) you can apply an aerosol puff, an oral dose or injection and be protected against dangerous entities, such as pathogens," Professor Lai in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering said.
Mucus is an elastic shield that selectively permits or traps particular particles from entering the immune system.
A variety of mucosal surfaces are found throughout the body, all of which are important to immune function and other body processes, like eye blinking.
Mucus is made of bundles of sticky fibers which are likely driven together by hydrophobic interactions - the fibers are repelled by water and clump together in "dry" regions.
This aggregation leaves holes in between the bundle clumps which let tiny particles, some of which may be toxins, pass through.
The researchers hypothesized that adding a detergent agent to the mucus would disrupt the bundles, breaking them up and making the space between clumps smaller and therefore allowing less passage of small particles.
In their study, the scientists used normal human cervicovaginal mucus in laboratory preparations.
They added the detergent nonoxynol-9, a common ingredient in lubricants and condoms for its spermicidal and microbicidal properties.
Then they observed videos of flourescently labelled probe beads, in diameters from 100 to 1,000 nanometers to correspond to various pathogen sizes, as they moved through the mucosal membrane.
The beads between 200 and 500 nanometers were hindered in passage through the detergent-treated mucus, suggesting that the experiment did indeed serve to tighten the space between fiber bundles.
Interestingly, at larger-than-nanoscale sizes, the detergent did not alter the properties of the mucus, which are necessary to allow the mucus to function as a lubricant and a particle-clearing structure.
How can the detergent only affect mucus on the nanoscale?
"While a finer mesh typically leads to more entanglement that increases the bulk rheological properties, this is offset by their reduced stickiness to each other, enabling us to specifically exert nanoscale alterations but not bulk macroscale alterations," Lai said.
In other words, the fibers are more spread out but are less able to stick to one another, creating a wider and less permeable mesh.
The implications of the study are promising, but further experiments are needed to be able to use the technique of mucus alteration for practical medical purposes.
The researchers are planning animal studies which will hopefully lead to human testing in the future. Nano-treated mucus membranes could block infections in many body areas.
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