When is food simply nourishing and enjoyable, and when does it provoke an allergic reaction? The answer appears to lie in the balance of microbes that live in our intestine – and a specific protein secreted by intestinal goblet cells that influences that balance.
Excess amounts of this protein, RELMb, changes the profile of intestinal microbes in a way that cause the body not to tolerate certain triggering foods, finds a new study from Boston Children’s Hospital just published in Nature.
“We also showed that RELMb is increased in children with food allergy,” says Talal Chatila, MD, who co-led the study with Seth Rakoff-Nahoum, MD, PhD. Emmanuel Stephen-Victor, PhD, in the Chatila lab and Gavin Kuziel, a PhD student in the Rakoff-Nahoum, lab were co-first authors.
The good news is that RELMb can…