When it comes to studying the effect of food bioactives on gut health, one of the essential steps that needs to be assessed is characterizing specific effects of the bioactives on the physical barrier of the lumen, the gastrointestinal tissue. In addition to studying the effects on transport function (e.g. by using Ussing chambers or cell culture systems), it is of great interest to evaluate the effects on morphology, cell biology, gene expression, and relevant functions of different cell types that are resident in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. An ideal near-physiological model should contain a mixture of different GI epithelial cells (e.g. Paneth cells, goblet cells, absorptive and hormone secretive epithelial cells), which can be cultured indefinitely. Recently, the culture and applications of long-term primary multi-cellular cluster structures gastrointestinal organoids (or enteroids) have been demonstrated, and within the last 5 years the number of researchers that commonly use this tissue culture model has increased rapidly. This multi-cellular system may be a promising addition for existing ex vivo and alternative for animal models for testing effects of food bioactives on the intestinal tissue, and could provide a model for pre-screening of compounds prior to moving to the large scale testing systems. Moreover, intestinal organoids can be cultured from different species (e.g. human, pig and mouse). In this chapter we will focus on organoids cultured from mouse and pig crypt cells. We will give a short overview on how to isolate, culture, incubate, and apply them in different research fields.
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