Secció de Fisiologia, Departament de Bioquímica i Fisiologia, Facultat de Farmàcia i Ciències de l'Alimentació, Universitat de Barcelona, 08028 Barcelona, Spain; Institut de Neurociències, Universitat de Barcelona, 08035 Barcelona, Spain; Centros de Biomedicina en Red de Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas (CIBERNED), 28031 Madrid, Spain.
Secció de Fisiologia, Departament de Bioquímica i Fisiologia, Facultat de Farmàcia i Ciències de l'Alimentació, Universitat de Barcelona, 08028 Barcelona, Spain; Institut de Neurociències, Universitat de Barcelona, 08035 Barcelona, Spain; Centros de Biomedicina en Red de Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas (CIBERNED), 28031 Madrid, Spain.
Ageing Res Rev. 2021 Dec;72:101484. doi: 10.1016/j.arr.2021.101484. Epub 2021 Oct 9.
Corpora amylacea (CA) have been described in several human organs and have been associated with ageing and several pathological conditions. Although they were first discovered two centuries ago, their function and significance have not yet been identified. Here, we provide a chronological summary of the findings on CA in various organs and identify their similarities. After collecting and integrating these findings, we propose to consider CA as waste containers created by specific cells, which sequester waste products and foreign products, and assemble them within a glycan structure. The containers are then secreted into the external medium or interstitial spaces, in this latter case subsequently being phagocytosed by macrophages. This proposal explains, among others, why CA are so varied in content, why only some of them contain fibrillary amyloid proteins, why all of them contain glycan structures, why some of them contain neo-epitopes and are phagocytosed, and why they can be intracellular or extracellular structures. Lastly, in order to avoid the ambiguity of the term amyloid (which can indicate starch-like structures but also insoluble fibrillary proteins), we propose renaming CA as "wasteosomes", emphasising the waste products they entrap rather than their misleading amyloid properties.
脑砂（CA）已在多种人体器官中被描述，并与衰老和多种病理状况有关。尽管它们在两个世纪前就被首次发现，但它们的功能和意义尚未确定。在这里，我们按照时间顺序对不同器官中 CA 的发现进行了总结，并确定了它们的相似之处。在收集和整合这些发现后，我们提出将 CA 视为特定细胞产生的废物容器，这些细胞可以隔离废物和外来产物，并将它们组装在糖基结构中。然后，这些容器被分泌到外部介质或细胞间隙中，在后一种情况下，被巨噬细胞吞噬。除其他外，这一假说解释了为什么 CA 在内容上如此多样化，为什么只有其中一些含有纤维状淀粉样蛋白，为什么它们都含有糖基结构，为什么其中一些含有新表位并被吞噬，以及为什么它们可以是细胞内或细胞外结构。最后，为了避免“淀粉样”一词的歧义（它既可以表示淀粉样结构，也可以表示不溶性纤维状蛋白质），我们建议将 CA 重新命名为“废物体”，强调它们所捕获的废物，而不是其具有误导性的淀粉样特性。
