BioProject

Epithelial cells play an important role in the protection of the colon mucosa from the resident microbiota and are involved in the initiation and maintenance of intestinal inflammation. More...

Epithelial cells play an important role in the protection of the colon mucosa from the resident microbiota and are involved in the initiation and maintenance of intestinal inflammation. LMD is a technique that allows the extraction of specific cell types, such as colonic epithelial cells, to analyse gene expression. LMD of colon epithelial cells followed by microarray analysis could be of more value than microarray analysis of intact colon for determining which pathways are active in the colon mucosa in the early and late stages of inflammation due to increased sensitivity to changes in specific cell populations. An experiment was performed using microarray analysis of intact colon samples and microdissected colon epithelial cell samples from Il10-/- and C57BL/6J mice at 6 and 12 weeks of age to study the molecular changes that occur in early and late inflammation stages in colon epithelium of a mouse model of colitis. Results showed that intact colon and colon epithelial cell gene expression profiles were similar in terms of pathways between Il10-/- and C57BL/6J mice at 12 weeks of age and between Il10-/- mice at 12 and 6 weeks of age. More immune-related pathways were identified at 6 weeks of age in epithelial cells than intact colon. This suggests that LMD and targeting of specific cell types may be of particular use when studying the early stages of inflammation before the intestinal morphology is detectably altered, by increasing analysis sensitivity to mucosal gene expression changes. Overall design: 2x2 factorial with two tissue types analysed. Two strains of mouse (Il10 knockout mouse and the background strain C57BL/6J) were sampled at 2 timepoints (6 and 12 weeks of age) and intact proximal colon and colon epithelium harvested from each mouse (6 mice per group except for group colon epithelium C57 mouse 12 weeks where only 5 samples reached quality control standards). Less...