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Updated: Jul 12, 2026

Using Human Intestinal Organoids to Understand the Small Intestine Epithelium at the Single Cell Transcriptional Level
Published on: June 28, 2024
Using genomics to understand intestinal biology
1Department of Foods and Nutrition and Interdepartmental Nutrition Program, Purdue University, 700 West State St., West Lafayette, IN 47906-2059, USA. fleet@purdue.edu
Abstract:
The use of microarrays to evaluate the transcriptome has transformed our view of biology. In addition to the focused, hypothesis-testing studies that we have traditionally conducted in cell biology, we are now able to see global changes within the entire system of the cell in response to a treatment. By examining a biological question under multiple complementary perturbations model systems (e.g. yeast, C. Elegans) have revealed new complexity that would have been impossible to see on a gene-by-gene approach. Unfortunately, beyond the use of transcript profiles to define the molecular signature of diseases (e.g. cancer), transcriptomics has not been extensively used to study intestinal biology. This review will provide a roadmap for effective use of gene expression profiling for biological research and will review some of the microarray work that has been done to better understand the nature of intestinal development and enterocyte differentiation.
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