When we eat food, our gut somehow senses its presence to begin shifting it along our digestive tract, but the question has always been – how?
Now, new Flinders University research using both human gut samples and mice has discovered that a touch-sensing protein that was a focus of a 2021 Nobel Prize, called Piezo2, is not just in our fingers, but also in our gut, with its presence likely playing a key role in constipation. This work has recently been published in the leading international journal Gastroenterology.