Intestinal epithelial cell differentiation: new insights from mice, flies and nematodes.
Decisions commonly made during development that affect proliferation, cell fate specification, differentiation, migration, and death are made repeatedly in the mouse small intestinal epithelium throughout adulthood. The results of these decisions are a stratification of proliferation, differentiation, and death along the mouse small intestine's crypt/villus axis. Recent genetic studies in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster have identified factors involved in determining cell fate and differentiation in gut endoderm. The stem cell hierarchy of the adult mouse intestinal epithelium makes it ideally suited for using chimeric animals to examine the functions of homologs of these lower eukaryotic (and other) proteins.
Simon
T C
TC
Department of Molecular Biology and Pharmacology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri 63110, USA.
Gordon
J I
JI
D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans; D002454:Cell Differentiation; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster; D004707:Endoderm / Q000502:physiology; D004847:Epithelial Cells; D007413:Intestinal Mucosa / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology; D007421:Intestine, Small / Q000166:cytology; D007422:Intestines / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology; D008648:Mesoderm / Q000502:physiology; D051379:Mice; D008822:Mice, Transgenic; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D013045:Species Specificity