Making Perfect Copies

Organoids, or ‘mini-organs’, have become a common way to try and understand how organs and tissues function in a lab setting. Several organoids are available which mimic different organs, but many fall short of replicating the original exactly. That's the case for intestinal organoids – where some important cell types are absent. For example, Paneth cells, important for preventing infections, are missing or rare. Researchers have now optimised how to make intestinal organoids (pictured) so they appear and function even more like a human gut. By adding a molecule called interleukin-22 to the organoids, Paneth cells (red) were activated alongside other key cell types of the gut, like endocrine cells (magenta) and goblet cells (green). These optimised organoids more closely mimic a healthy intestine and provide an even better way to study and understand how the gut functions properly, and what happens when things go wrong.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Sophie Arthur

former Science Communications Officer MRC LMS

Formerly a stem cell biologist, Sophie has since moved into science communication working at the MRC LMS. She also writes an award winning science and education blog Soph talks science.

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• Image from work by Gui-Wei He and Lin Lin, and colleagues
• Oncode Institute, Hubrecht Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and University Medical Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Cell Stem Cell, August 2022