The liver grows after eating

The size of the liver may vary throughout the day and depending on the lunch schedule

Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life", based on the materials of The Scientist.

We once wrote that the female brain – more precisely, the hippocampus, one of the main memory centers – changes according to the phases of the menstrual cycle: regular fluctuations of hormones in the body of women leads to the fact that their hippocampus increases and decreases. Something similar happens to the liver, however, it changes according to a different schedule, and these changes have been observed so far only in mice.

Ueli Schibler and his colleagues from the University of Geneva and a number of other scientific centers write in an article in Cell that mouse hepatocytes (liver cells) increase in size at night, so that as a result, the liver of animals became half larger; during the day, hepatocytes shrink and the liver, respectively, decreases.

However, there is one caveat here: mice are nocturnal animals, for which it is natural to eat and generally "be active" in the dark, and changes in the liver were observed only in those of them who were fed at night. If the mice were fed during the day, neither the liver cells nor the liver itself hardly changed in size.

At the molecular level, the following happened here: in the hepatocytes of mice fed at night, a lot of protein accumulated and the number of ribosomes increased – large molecular complexes that synthesize protein molecules using matrix RNAs as instructions for assembly (the RNAs themselves are copies of genes recorded in DNA).

It seems that here we are dealing with another manifestation of circadian, or circadian rhythms. However, when the researchers turned off one of the main diurnal genes in mice, the molecular picture remained almost unchanged: at night, the molecules necessary for ribosome assembly still accumulated in the cells (it can be assumed that protein synthesis in the liver remained at the same level). And all this, again, could be observed in animals that were fed at night. It turns out that the feeding cycle affects the liver quite independently of the biological clock, although there should definitely be a connection between the two – it's not for nothing that the daily feeding had no effect.

Why the liver increases and decreases is still unclear; most likely, it's all about digestion and assimilation of nutrients that enter the body at a certain time of day.

It would be interesting to know if such changes affect the ability of the liver to process various foreign substances, from toxins to drugs. If indeed they do, and if the human liver also behaves in a similar way, then perhaps in many therapeutic schemes it would be necessary to adjust the intake of medications so that a very active liver does not break them down too quickly.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  11.05.2017