Surfactant-like particles in the intestine

A project on the study of surfactant-like particles (SLPs) was funded by NIH, USA, for nearly 10 years with the aim to charac-terize the SLPs, secreted by the small in-testine in response to fat feeding and to determine their physiological functions. The work started in 1989, when David Alpers and his colleagues from the Department of Gastroenterology, Washington University Medical School, St Louis, USA, published a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry1. The published findings showed the presence of a thick membranous layer on the intestinal surface in rats fed with corn oil (Figure 1). This was collected by scrap-ing the surface with a filter sheet and upon centrifugation in NaBr gradient (0.49–1.46 M (molar)), it formed a translucent layer in fraction 3 from the top (Figure 2) © 2022, Current Science.All Rights Reserved.