YehXiang Yao (Encey)

• BSc (Honours) Food and Human Nutrition (NUIS)
• The Mucus Barrier: Understanding and Recreating a Suitable Analog for Absorption Studies

Intestinal mucus acts as a protective barrier from external infections and physical damage to intestinal walls. To better understand the role mucus plays in absorption, laboratory experiments could not use commercial mucus or freshly harvested mucus to use on gut surface cells; these mucus samples although are fairly easy to obtain, readily kill the cells that it is applied to, due to their contaminated nature. This study aims to understand properties of intestinal mucus and come up with a formulation to reproduce a substance from mucus constructs and mimics actual mucus in a normal gut.

The bulk of mucus is made up with water, and the remaining constituents are mainly mucin, (a gelling molecule), and other cellular components like proteins, DNA, lipids etc. These ingredients are carefully separated from other contaminants in mucus, and remade into a mucus like consistency which hopefully could be a useful for future absorption studies.

Funding source: Newcastle University

Supervisor: Dr Matthew Wilcox