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Mucins keep the brain safe and could guard against ageing
Slippery proteins in the brain’s blood vessels form a protective barrier that breaks down with age, studies in mice show.
The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. But scientists knew little about the contribution of mucins to these changes, until Sophia Shi, a graduate student at Stanford, decided to focus on a mucin-rich layer called the glycocalyx, which lines blood vessels. Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research
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