Digestive infections can wreak havoc on the enteric nervous system, leading to persistent digestive issues. But, if there is an upside to them, it’s that they may steel the gut against future assaults: the intestinal neurons of mice previously infected with either intestinal worms or pathogenic bacteria were more resilient to Salmonella infections, researchers report November 11 in Cell.
Unlike intestinal epithelial cells, whose snappy turnover helps the gut rapidly heal from tissue destruction, intestinal neurons usually suffer lasting damage during infections and inflammatory conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or Crohn’s disease. Since these neurons are important for everything from controlling gut motility to hormone secretion, this damage has enduring and often painful consequences.
Lead study author Daniel Mucida, an immunologist at The Rockefeller University and HHMI investigator, and his colleagues had recently observed that Salmonella infection triggers long-term enteric neuron death in mice. However, they also saw ...
