Test Intestine

Your gut is a paradise for certain microscopic travellers. These wanderers don’t all come in peace, however, and when unwelcome bugs settle in for a stay in your intestine, it’s not long before you feel unwell. Precisely how these invaders bed in and cause disease is hard to study so not fully understood. A new project has developed an artificial model representing the intestine that can be used to test and observe infections. The model is created by seeding human cells on a biological scaffold. Once developed, these cells respond just like those in the body when infected. The researchers observed Campylobacter jejuni (green in the section of the model pictured), bacteria that causes food poisoning, wreaking havoc, and discovered new details about how it takes hold and causes problems. This model could be used to study infection patterns and outcomes for many invaders that infect our intestines.

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 Mona Alzheimer and colleagues
• Institute of Molecular Infection Biology and Department of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, University Hospital Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Pathogens, February 2020