Opinion Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jul 7, 2019; 25(25): 3116-3122
Published online Jul 7, 2019. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v25.i25.3116
Fate plasticity in the intestine: The devil is in the detail
Simon Buczacki
Simon Buczacki, Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Addenbrooke’s Biomedical Campus, Cambridge CB2 0AF, United Kingdom
Author contributions: Buczacki S conceived, researched and wrote this opinion review.
Supported by a Fellowship grant from Cancer Research UK C14094/A27178; and core funding from Wellcome and MRC to the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The author has declared no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Simon Buczacki, FRCS, MBChB, PhD, Senior Scientist, Surgical Oncologist, Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Addenbrooke’s Biomedical Campus, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0AF, United Kingdom. sjab2@cam.ac.uk
Telephone: +44-1223-256879 Fax: +44-1223-256879
Received: February 21, 2019
Peer-review started: February 22, 2019
First decision: April 30, 2019
Revised: May 14, 2019
Accepted: May 31, 2019
Article in press: June 1, 2019
Published online: July 7, 2019
Core Tip

Core tip: Recent advances, using transgenic mice, in understanding cellular hierarchies in the intestinal epithelium have identified numerous cell populations which retain the ability to change their fate in response to injury. Here, these new studies are presented in the context of a discussion about what represents a relevant epithelial injury to understand “homeostatic regeneration”. Experimental suggestions are proposed for validating animal findings to translate our current knowledge to better understand human intestinal epithelial maintenance.