Issue 257 / April 2023
The Slime Inside Us
When I was small, I used to visit an elderly lady who lived next door to us. With her, I would make rice-filled frogs. The kind you can fling from one end of a room to land flat, with a plod and no bounce, onto the arm of a chair or the back of a sofa. In the 1970s, these colourful frogs haunted every household in the UK. As I painstakingly cut out frog-shaped pieces of paisley-patterned material, Lady Clarke, as she was called, used to tower over me, observing my every move with a drop always hanging off the end of her nose. I would sit there terrified that it would lose grip and drip on to me. But it never did. It just wobbled, menacingly, until it was wiped away with a handkerchief Lady Clarke kept tucked up one of her sleeves. That drop was mucus. Besides exuding from our nose, especially when we have a cold or when we get old, mucus lines the mucous membranes of our body, where it keeps things lubricated and, generally, healthy. Mucus is composed of a lot of water and several macromolecules, among them glycoproteins that carry sialic acid. Why sialic acid? Because it helps to keep pathogens away. And how does it get there? By way of sialyltransferases.
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Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |