Trehalose tagged posts

University of Wyoming researchers’ study of how microscopic creatures called tardigrades survive extreme conditions has led to a major breakthrough that could eventually make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration is not possible.

Thomas Boothby, an assistant professor of molecular biology, and colleagues have shown that natural and engineered versions of tardigrade proteins can be used to stabilize an impo...

A new study shows that a type of natural sugar called trehalose triggers an important cellular housekeeping process in immune cells that helps treat atherosclerotic plaque. The image shows a cross section of a mouse aorta, the main artery in the body, with a large plaque. Straight red lines toward the upper left are the wall of the aorta. Yellow areas are where housekeeping cells called macrophages are incinerating cellular waste. Credit: Ismail Sergin

Trehalose triggers cellular housekeeping in artery-clogging. Researchers have long sought ways to harness the body’s immune system to treat disease, especially cancer...

Trehalose

Trehalose prevents fructose – thought to be a major contributor to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease – from entering the liver and triggers a cellular housekeeping process that cleans up excess fat buildup inside liver cells. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition closely linked to obesity, affects ~25% of people in the U.S. There is no drug treatment for the disease, although weight loss can reduce the buildup of fat in the liver.

“In general, if you feed a mouse a high-sugar diet, it gets a fatty liver,” said Brian J. DeBosch, MD, PhD, a pediatric gastroenterologist. “We found that if you feed a mouse a diet high in fructose plus provide drinking water that contains 3% trehalose, you completely block the development of a fatty liver...