New Balance

From skin to bones, cells throughout the body refresh and renew, fresh recruits replacing the old when wear and tear takes its toll. The intestine lining is a master of this, with a regular supply of fresh cells drawn from ‘stem cell zones’ – pools of cells ready to develop as needed. How these zones maintain their supply without overstepping and prompting the excessive growth of cancer is a key question in fundamental biology and health research. To investigate, researchers developed a new way to stabilise organoids – microscopic model systems – and image them regularly to observe and test development (one pictured growing over a week). They found that the physical forces resulting from swelling prompted stem cells to specialise into functional intestinal cells, but that the structure didn't maintain size and shape intrinsically, suggesting other mechanisms may be at play to keep a healthy balance in the body.

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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• Video from work by Naren P.Tallapragada and Hailey M.Cambra, and colleagues
• Department of Systems Biology, Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
• Video copyright Elsevier 2021. Reproduced with permission.
• Published in Cell Stem Cell, April 2021