14 DAY TRIAL // Here's a piece of news that's likely to change the way you look at fish either lying in your plate or swimming around in a nearby aquarium.
Apparently, fish skin is strikingly similar to the mammalian gut.
Specifically, the cells that make up fish skin and those that line the gastrointestinal tract of most mammals both lack keratin, which acts as a barrier against various environmental threats.
Instead, they house a significant population of microbes, and are covered in mucus.
What's more, they behave in a similar manner. Specifically, they produce antibodies that ensure mucosal immune defenses.
These antibodies keep otherwise friendly bacteria living on fish skin and inside the mammalian gut from entering the animal's body and infecting it, EurekAlert explains.
“In fish, the skin and the gut have much in common: they are both constantly exposed to environmental insults, they both have a large and varied microbiota and they both contain mucosal surfaces.”
“So we hypothesized that the skin should have a similar immune response to the gut, and this is indeed what we found,” says researcher J. Oriol Sunyer of the University of Pennsylvania.
“I like to think of fish as an open gut swimming,” he adds.
J. Oriol Sunyer and his colleagues have concluded that fish skin is not very much unlike the inside of a mammal's intestinal tract by looking into the morphology and the physiology of rainbow trout skin.