ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Polymers in the gut compress the colonic mucus hydrogel.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- Applications of a continuum model for brush gels.International journal of solids and structures · 2026Article
- Mucofilm: a nexus for phage-microbiome interactions in gut ecology.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- A microfluidic platform for culturing and high-content imaging of adult stem cell-derived organoids.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Hydrogel-based experimental models of the gastrointestinal tract.Microbiome · 2025Review
- Spatial self-organization of confined bacterial suspensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Morphogenesis of bacterial cables in polymeric environments.Science advances · 2025Article
- Cell shape affects bacterial colony growth under physical confinement.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Review
- Pseudomonas aeruginosa type IV pili actively induce mucus contraction to form biofilms in tissue-engineered human airways.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Surface tension coupled non-uniformly imposed flows modulate the activity of reproducing chemotactic bacteria in porous media.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Mucus-Inspired Dynamic Hydrogels: Synthesis and Future Perspectives.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2022Review
- Reduced surface accumulation of swimming bacteria in viscoelastic polymer fluids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A biophysical threshold for biofilm formation.eLife · 2022Article
- Influence of confinement on the spreading of bacterial populations.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Enhanced microscopic dynamics in mucus gels under a mechanical load in the linear viscoelastic regime.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Gut bacterial aggregates as living gels.eLife · 2021Article
- Biophysical determinants of biofilm formation in the gut.Current opinion in biomedical engineering · 2021Article
- Article
- Mechanistic Approaches of Internalization, Subcellular Trafficking, and Cytotoxicity of Nanoparticles for Targeting the Small Intestine.AAPS PharmSciTech · 2020Review
- Swarming Motility Without Flagellar Motor Switching by Reversal of Swimming Direction inFrontiers in microbiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Colonic mucus is a key biological hydrogel that protects the gut from infection and physical damage and mediates host-microbe interactions and drug delivery. However, little is known about how its structure is influenced by materials it comes into contact with regularly. For example, the gut abounds in polymers such as dietary fibers or administered therapeutics, yet whether such polymers interact with the mucus hydrogel, and if so, how, remains unclear. Although several biological processes have been identified as potential regulators of mucus structure, the polymeric composition of the gut environment has been ignored. Here, we demonstrate that gut polymers do in fact regulate mucus hydrogel structure, and that polymer-mucus interactions can be described using a thermodynamic model based on Flory-Huggins solution theory. We found that both dietary and therapeutic polymers dramatically compressed murine colonic mucus ex vivo and in vivo. This behavior depended strongly on both polymer concentration and molecular weight, in agreement with the predictions of our thermodynamic model. Moreover, exposure to polymer-rich luminal fluid from germ-free mice strongly compressed the mucus hydrogel, whereas exposure to luminal fluid from specific-pathogen-free mice-whose microbiota degrade gut polymers-did not; this suggests that gut microbes modulate mucus structure by degrading polymers. These findings highlight the role of mucus as a responsive biomaterial, and reveal a mechanism of mucus restructuring that must be integrated into the design and interpretation of studies involving therapeutic polymers, dietary fibers, and fiber-degrading gut microbes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.