Mucus and Mucins May Become Medicines in the Future

Many people instinctively consider mucus (image) as something unappealing, but in fact, it has incredibly many valuable functions for our health. It keeps track of our important intestinal flora and feeds the bacteria. It covers all internal surfaces of our body, and, as a barrier to the outside world, it helps us protect ourselves from infectious diseases. This is because mucus acts as a filter that keeps the bacteria in or out, and the bacteria feed on the sugars in the mucus between meals. So, if we can produce the mucus that is already present in the body with the right sugars, it might be used in brand new medical treatments. Now, researchers from the DNRF Centre of Excellence, Copenhagen Center for Glycomics, have discovered how to artificially produce the healthy mucus. The article was published online on July 1, 2021 in Nature Communications. The open-access article is titled “Display of the Human Mucinome with Defined O-Glycans by Gene Engineered Cells.”