In Praise of Mucus It's time to say something good about... mucus.
"If you're into mucus, it's a fascinating mucus," says Churchill.
Anyway, if you ever needed a reason to shove a gold earring into your septum and pretend it's pierced, plait your hair and cry tears of crystal mucus, it's here. .
The Muc2 mucin builds the structure of the mucus as it is the major component and has the biochemical properties in its oligomerized form to form net-like structures [8].
Snail locomotion depends entirely on the snail's ability to push on the mucus when it is solid and to glide over it when it is liquid.
While the research is mixed on whether the casein in dairy products promotes mucus, it should be noted that casein is used to create adhesives, and some people think it makes mucus thicker.
As mucociliary clearance is affected by rheological properties of the mucus blanket [9], it is likely that the increased mucus production in the ET of animals that received cSPLUNC1 siRNA contributed to the results that we observed.
Interestingly, mucus is viscoelastic: it is marked by both viscosity (a liquid property), because of its resistance to flow and its capacity to absorb energy when in motion, and elasticity (a solid property), because of its capacity to store energy that is used to move or deform mass.
"So, I made a case for mucus," recalls Ribbeck, now an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT. "I said we should study mucus because it's a really amazing barrier.
In particular, local invasiveness may be increased in areas of high extracellular mucus content, as it is found in MAC.
