Cell clusters containing intestinal stem cells line, the zebrafish intestine intervillus pocket

Sahar Tavakoli; Shiwen Zhu; Paul Matsudaira

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104280

Cell clusters containing intestinal stem cells line, the zebrafish intestine intervillus pocket

iScience. 2022 Apr 22;25(5):104280. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104280. eCollection 2022 May 20.

Authors

Sahar Tavakoli¹, Shiwen Zhu¹, Paul Matsudaira¹

Affiliation

¹ Center for BioImaging Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore.

Abstract

In the mammalian intestine, stem cells (ISCs) replicate in basal crypts, translocate along the villus, and undergo cell death. This pattern of renewal occurs in the zebrafish intestine in which villi are elongated into villar ridges (VR) separated by intervillus pockets (IVP) but lack the infolded crypts. To understand how epithelial dynamics is maintained without crypts, we investigated the origin of epithelial lineage patterns derived from ISCs in the IVP of chimeric and zebrabow recombinant intestines. We found that the VR epithelium and IVP express the same recombinant colors when expression is under the control of ISC marker promoter prmt1. The expression originates from cell clusters that line the IVP and contain epithelial cells including Prmt1-labeled cells. Our data suggest that Prmt1 is a zebrafish ISC marker and the ISCs reside within basal cell clusters that are functionally analogous to crypts.

Keywords: Biological sciences; Cell biology; Stem cells research.