Many patients suffer from chronic gastrointestinal diseases characterized by chronic inflammation, increased intestinal permeability and visceral pain in which there is no definitive treatment. Adult stem cells have recently been used in various disease states to contribute wound-healing processes. In the current study we investigated the ability of intra-colonic adult stem cells application to...

Recent studies on human inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) have brought our attention to continued epithelial injury and impaired epithelial regeneration as their key pathophysiological features. In order to develop a novel approach for the treatment of IBD, it is important to understand the ordered process of epithelial repair and the pivotal roles for the epithelial stem cells in this process....

The intestinal stem cell fuels the highest rate of tissue turnover in the body and has been implicated in intestinal disease and cancer; understanding the regulatory mechanisms controlling intestinal stem cell physiology is of great importance. Here, we provide evidence that the transcription factor YY1 is essential for intestinal stem cell renewal. We observe that YY1 loss skews normal homeost...

The high rate of turnover of the intestinal epithelium is maintained by a group of stem cells that reside at the base of the crypts of Lieberkuhn. Whereas the existence of these intestinal epithelial stem cells has been well established, their study has been limited due to the inability to isolate them. Previous work has utilized side population (SP) sorting of the murine small intestine to iso...

BACKGROUND The canonical Wnt signaling pathway is a known regulator of cell proliferation during development and maintenance of the intestinal epithelium. Perturbations in this pathway lead to aberrant epithelial proliferation and intestinal cancer. In the mature intestine, proliferation is confined to the relatively quiescent stem cells and the rapidly cycling transient-amplifying cells in the...

Tissues that undergo self-renewal such as the skin, the haematopoeitic system and the intestine are all maintained and renewed by a small group of multipotent stem cells. The stem cells of the intestinal epithelium are located in the crypts and give rise to its four main lineages located mainly in the finger like projections- the villi. An increasing number of genes are now being identified as ...

Calcium ions are well-known intracellular signalling molecules. A new study identifies local cytoplasmic calcium as a central integrator of metabolic and proliferative signals in Drosophila intestinal stem cells.

The conventional model of intestinal epithelial architecture describes a unidirectional tissue organizational hierarchy with stem cells situated at the crypt base and daughter cells proliferating and terminally differentiating as they progress along the vertical (crypt-luminal) axis. In this model, the fate of a cell that has left the niche is determined and its lifespan limited. Evidence is ac...

Research on intestinal epithelial stem cells has flourished in the last few years since their specific markers were identified. However, to exploit the potentials of those adult stem cells as a source for regenerative medicine, validation of the tissue regeneration capability of intestinal stem cells would be essential. We have recently shown that, by employing murine models of transplantation,...