10/27/2016 09:00 AM EDT
Caption: This “spooky” video ends with a scientific image of intestinal crypts (blue and green) plus organoids made from cultured crypt stem cells (pink). As Halloween approaches, some of you might be thinking about cueing up the old TV series “Tales from the Crypt” and diving into its Vault of Horror for a few hours. But […]
Snapshots of Life: Tales from the (Intestinal) Crypt!
Caption: This “spooky” video ends with a scientific image of intestinal crypts (blue and green) plus organoids made from cultured crypt stem cells (pink).
As Halloween approaches, some of you might be thinking about cueing up the old TV series “Tales from the Crypt” and diving into its Vault of Horror for a few hours. But today I’d like to share the story of a quite different and not nearly so scary kind of crypt: the crypts of Lieberkühn, more commonly called intestinal crypts.
This confocal micrograph depicts a row of such crypts (marked in blue and green) lining a mouse colon. In mice, as well as in humans, the intestines contain millions of crypts, each of which has about a half-dozen stem cells at its base that are capable of regenerating the various types of tissues that make up these tiny glands. What makes my tale of the crypt particularly interesting are the oval structures (pink), which are organoids that have been engineered from cultured crypt stem cells and then transplanted into a mouse model. If you look at the organoids closely, you’ll see Paneth cells (aqua blue), which are immune cells that support the stem cells and protect the intestines from bacterial invasion.
A winner in the 2016 “Image Awards” at the Koch Institute Public Galleries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, this image was snapped by Jatin Roper, a physician-scientist in the lab of Omer Yilmaz, with the help of his MIT collaborator Tuomas Tammela. Roper and his colleagues have been making crypt organoids for a few years by placing the stem cells in a special 3D chamber, where they are bathed with the right protein growth factors at the right time to spur them to differentiate into the various types of cells found in a crypt.
Once the organoids are developmentally complete, Roper can inject them into mice and watch them take up residence. Then he can begin planning experiments.
For example, Roper’s group is now considering using the organoids to examine how high-fat and low-calorie diets affect intestinal function in mice. Another possibility is to use similar organoids to monitor the effect of aging on the colon or to test which of a wide array of targeted therapies might work best for a particular individual with colon cancer.
Links:
Video: Gut Reaction (Jatin Roper)
Jatin Roper (Tufts Medical Center, Boston)
Omer Yilmaz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge)
NIH Support: National Cancer Institute; National Institute on Aging
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