Disposable Liners

Your intestine’s lining of cells, or epithelium, is replaced roughly once a week, like a used bin bag. As a result, a constant supply is needed – running out of bin bags is serious business – and when the resupply is disrupted, major problems can arise. This can happen in patients who have received bone marrow transplants to fight off illness, as the newly arrived immune cells launch a misguided attack on intestinal cells. To better understand the process, researchers looked at newly transplanted mice and cells in artificial organs in the lab, and found the immune cells directly target the stem cells that give rise to epithelial cells (epithelial cells derived from intestinal stem cells in red in the mouse intestine cross section pictured). They also found that a particular set of proteins can protect the stem cell collection from attack, which could ultimately help safeguard the supply in recovering patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by S. Takashima, M. L. Martin, S. A. Jansen, C. A. Lindemans, and A. M. Hanash and colleagues
• Department of Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors, published on the cover of Science Immunology, Vol. 4, Issue 42
• Published in Science Immunology, December 2019