How the Body Uses Fat to Fight Infection
From:
University of East Anglia
December 8, 2021 -- New research from
the University of East Anglia and Quadram Institute reveals how our immune
cells use the body’s fat stores to fight infection.
The research, published today in the
journal Nature Communications, could help develop new approaches to
treating people with bacterial infections.
The research team say their work could
one day help treat infections in vulnerable and older people.
The team studied Salmonella - a
bacterial infection which causes diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fever and
sepsis.
The UEA team collaborated with the
Quadram Institute and colleagues at the Earlham Institute, to track fatty acid
movement and consumption in live stem cells.
They went on to analyse the immune
response to Salmonella bacterial infection, by analysing liver damage.
They uncovered how blood stem cells
respond to infection, by acquiring high energy fatty acids from the body’s fat
stores.
The team found that in the bone marrow
where blood stem cells are resident, infection signals drive adipocytes to
release their fat stores as fatty acids into the blood.
And they identified that these high
energy fatty acids are then taken up by blood stem cells, effectively feeding the
stem cells and enabling them to make millions of Salmonella-fighting white
blood cells.
The researchers also identified the
mechanism by which the fatty acids are transferred and discusses the potential
impact this new knowledge could have on future treatment of infection.
Dr Stuart Rushworth, from UEA’s Norwich
Medical School, said: “Our results provide insight into how the blood and
immune system is able to respond to infection.
“Fighting infection takes a lot of
energy and fat stores are huge energy deposits, which provide the fuel for the
blood stem cells to power up the immune response.
“Working out the mechanism through which
this ‘fuel boost’ works gives us new ideas on how to strengthen the bodies
fight against infection in the future.”
Dr Naiara Beraza, from the Quadram
institute, said: “Our results allow us to understand how our immune system uses
fat to fuel the response to infection. Defining these mechanisms will enable us
to develop new therapeutics to treat infections in the liver.”
Dr Rushworth said: “In the future, I
hope our findings will help improve treatment for vulnerable and older people
with infections, by strengthening their immune response.
“With antibiotic resistance being such a
present and widespread challenge for society, there is an urgent need to
explore novel ways like this to help the body’s immune system to fight
infection,” he added.
The study was led by UEA and QI in
collaboration with the Earlham Institute. It was funded by the Wellcome Trust
and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), with
support from the UK Medical Research Council.
‘Free fatty-acid transport via CD36
drives β-oxidation-mediated hematopoietic stem cell response to infection’ is
published in the journal Nature Communications on December 8,
2021.
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