The research study team says their work might one day assistance deal with infections in vulnerable and older individuals.
The team studied Salmonella– a bacterial infection that causes diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, fever, and sepsis.
The UEA team worked together with the Quadram Institute and colleagues at the Earlham Institute, to track fat movement and usage in live stem cells. They went on to analyze the immune response to Salmonella bacterial infection, by examining liver damage.
They uncovered how blood stem cells react to infection, by acquiring high energy fatty acids from the bodys fat stores.
The team found that in the bone marrow where blood stem cells are resident, infection signals drive adipocytes to launch their fat stores as fatty acids into the blood..
And they recognized that these high energy fatty acids are then taken up by blood stem cells, efficiently feeding the stem cells and enabling them to make countless Salmonella-fighting leukocyte.
The scientists also recognized the system by which the fats are transferred and gone over the potential impact this new knowledge could have on future treatment of infection.
Dr. Stuart Rushworth, from UEAs Norwich Medical School, said: “Our results provide insight into how the blood and body immune system is able to respond to infection.
” Fighting infection takes a great deal of energy and fat stores are big energy deposits, which supply the fuel for the blood stem cells to power up the immune action.
” Working out the system through which this fuel increase works offers us originalities on how to enhance the bodies battle versus infection in the future.”.
Dr. Naiara Beraza, from the Quadram institute, said: “Our results enable us to comprehend how our body immune system utilizes fat to fuel the action to infection. Specifying these mechanisms will enable us to develop new therapies to treat infections in the liver.”.
Dr. Rushworth said: “In the future, I hope our findings will assist improve treatment for susceptible and older people with infections, by reinforcing their immune reaction.
” With antibiotic resistance being such a extensive and present challenge for society, there is an urgent need to explore novel methods like this to help the bodys body immune system to eliminate infection,” he added.
Reference: “Free fatty-acid transportation via CD36 drives β-oxidation-mediated hematopoietic stem cell reaction to infection” by Jayna J. Mistry, Charlotte Hellmich, Jamie A. Moore, Aisha Jibril, Iain Macaulay, Mar Moreno-Gonzalez, Federica Di Palma, Naiara Beraza, Kristian M. Bowles and Stuart A. Rushworth, 8 December 2021, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/ s41467-021-27460-9.
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.
New research from the University of East Anglia and Quadram Institute exposes how our immune cells use the bodys fat shops to combat infection.
The research, released today (December 8, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications, could help develop brand-new techniques to treating individuals with bacterial infections.