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 potentially be inhibited if children are found to have it in high amounts, raising the possibility of preventing or even curing food allergy.
Preventing food intolerance
Through multiple studies in intestinal organoids and mouse models, the researchers found that RELMb disrupts the body’s tolerance of triggering food antigens, and that does so by depleting certain bacterial species in the intestine that produce compounds known as indoles. The team also showed that indoles and indole derivatives – which are depleted in children with food allergy – spur the production of protective, long-lasting T regulatory cells that recognize food allergens as harmless.
RELMb is orchestrating changes in the gut microbiome. If there is too much RELMb, it