Lipofuscin is so toxic that it actually glows. It then occurred to biologists that theoretically, mass graves and graveyards should be glowing from the large proportions of lipofuscin. Upon inspection of mass grave sites in England, biologists came across something extraordinary. Bacteria had evolved and actually consumed the lipofuscin as a source of energy!
Soil bacteria quickly evolves to eat anything,such as oil and pullutates, and turns them into carbon dioxide and water.
The solution for lipofuscin build-up in our lysosomes is to study the soil bacteria that digests it and to discover the enzymes that it uses to degrade the junk; therefore, enabling us to deliver these enzymes into lysosomes.
We won't be able to simply inject the new enzymes, since it would be injected into the blood stream and that could have dangerous repercussions. It would also be difficult to use this enzyme for lysosome build up in the brain (which I shall discuss in my next post) because of the blood-brain barrier, which is a highly effective shield against enzymes.
The key would be to modify or introduce DNA to create the new enzyme through a gene therapy. For example, one could inject the lipofuscin-eating enzyme DNA into mannose 6-phosphate, which lysosomes pick up during their travels.
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