After every meal, the intestines perform an action called peristalsis - moving food through their hollow interiors with coordinated contractions and relaxations of the smooth muscle.
- By CHRISTEN BROWNLEE
For more than a century, scientists have known that nerve cells in the gut propel the colon to move, allowing the organ to perform its life-sustaining function. But exactly how these intestinal nerve cells do their job has remained elusive.
Now a new NIH-funded study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has identified the mechanism behind this phenomenon, showing that the gut's motility is altered by exercise, pressure, and inflammation.
The study results, based on experiments in mice and published March 24 in Cell, reveal that a pressure-sensing protein called PIEZO1 - named after the Greek word for pressure and the discovery of which won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine - plays a key role both in coordinating intestinal movements and keeping inflammation in this organ at bay.
If replicated in humans, the researchers said, the findings could inform the design of precision-targeted treatments that tame intestinal inflammation and treat disorders of gut motility, such as diarrhea and constipation.
"Eventually, we might stimulate PIEZO1 to speed up excretion, block it to treat diarrhea, or use it as a novel target to treat intestinal inflammation in IBD patients," said Ruaidhrí Jackson, assistant professor of immunology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and co-senior author on the study with Hongzhen Hu from the Icahn School of Medicine.
