Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Elucidating The Complex Signaling Events Driving Intestinal Stem Cell Plasticity Following Injury, Evan Lynch

Theses and Dissertations--Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics

Signaling events governing intestinal stem cell (ISC) homeostasis maintain the delicate balance of active self-renewal and passive differentiation to replenish intestinal epithelial cells (IEC) every 3-5 days. However, under certain contexts, ISC function is irreversibly compromised—requiring committed IEC lineages to dedifferentiate and regain “stemness”. In the current studies, we examine the signaling events driving epithelial cell responses to injury to expose pathologic failures in the healing response. Our specific goal is to tease out the cellular contexts that promote dedifferentiation to design effective therapeutics for disease conditions compromising ISC function.

First, we generated a novel transgenic animal using the epithelial-specific …