About

Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years optimising elegant solutions to extremely complicated problems. One example is the mucus gel that covers the human body's wet epithelial surfaces, spanning over 200 square meters. Mucus moisturizes and lubricates the epithelium and protects from invaders such as bacteria and viruses to maintain tissue homeostasis. Mucin glycoproteins are the major non-aqueous components of mucus, and are made up of  protein backbones decorated by sugar molecules, which produce remarkable chemical diversity. These properties allow mucins to play various roles in nature, including signalling to immune cells and bacteria to maintain homeostasis in mucosal tissues, as well as binding to and entrapping various viral particles in mucus gels while removing them by active mucus turnover. Our approach is to learn from nature’s solutions but improve nature's failures.