Homeostasis, injury and recovery dynamics at multiple scales in a self-organizing mouse intestinal crypt
Abstract
The maintenance of the functional integrity of the intestinal epithelium requires a tight coordination between cell production, migration and shedding along the crypt-villus axis. Dysregulation of these processes may result in loss of the intestinal barrier and disease. With the aim of generating a more complete and integrated understanding of how the epithelium maintains homeostasis and recovers after injury, we have built a multi-scale agent-based model (ABM) of the mouse intestinal epithelium. We demonstrate that stable, self-organizing behaviour in the crypt emerges from the dynamic interaction of multiple signalling pathways, such as Wnt, Notch, BMP, ZNRF3/RNF43 and YAP-Hippo pathways, which regulate proliferation and differentiation, respond to environmental mechanical cues, form feedback mechanisms and modulate the dynamics of the cell cycle protein network. The model recapitulates the crypt phenotype reported after persistent stem cell ablation and after the inhibition of the CDK1 cycle protein. Moreover, we simulated 5-fluorouracil (5-FU)-induced toxicity at multiple scales starting from DNA and RNA damage, which disrupts the cell cycle, cell signalling, proliferation, differentiation and migration and leads to loss of barrier integrity. During recovery, our in-silico crypt regenerates its structure in a self-organizing, dynamic fashion driven by dedifferentiation and enhanced by negative feedback loops. Thus, the model enables the simulation of xenobiotic-, in particular chemotherapy-, induced mechanisms of intestinal toxicity and epithelial recovery. Overall, we present a systems model able to simulate the disruption of molecular events and its impact across multiple levels of epithelial organization and demonstrate its application to epithelial research and drug development.
Data availability
The current manuscript is a computational study. No data have been generated for this manuscript. Modelling code is uploaded as Source Code.zip file
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (Innovative Medicines Initiative 2,No. 116030)
- Louis Gall
- Carrie Duckworth
- Ferran Jardi
- Lieve Lammens
- David Mark Pritchard
- Carmen Pin
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (Innovative Medicines Initiative 2,No. 116030)
- Louis Gall
- Carrie Duckworth
- Ferran Jardi
- Lieve Lammens
- David Mark Pritchard
- Carmen Pin
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experiments were performed in an Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care approved rodent facility and in accordance with the applicable animal welfare guidelines and legislation. Experimental procedures were approved by the institutional ethics committee. Ten-week-old male C57/BL6Y mice were obtained from Charles River (France). Mice were housed in polysulfon cages with corncob bedding under standard conditions of room temperature (21{degree sign}C {plus minus} 2), relative humidity (55% {plus minus} 15) and a 12-h light cycle. Water and a certified rodent pelleted maintenance diet were supplied ad libitum. Nest material and rodent retreats were provided for environmental enrichment.
Copyright
© 2023, Gall et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,271
- views
-
- 198
- downloads
-
- 1
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Genetics and Genomics
Obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension. Intriguingly, there is a subset of metabolically healthy obese (MHO) individuals who are seemingly able to maintain a healthy metabolic profile free of metabolic syndrome. The molecular underpinnings of MHO, however, are not well understood. Here, we report that CTRP10/C1QL2-deficient mice represent a unique female model of MHO. CTRP10 modulates weight gain in a striking and sexually dimorphic manner. Female, but not male, mice lacking CTRP10 develop obesity with age on a low-fat diet while maintaining an otherwise healthy metabolic profile. When fed an obesogenic diet, female Ctrp10 knockout (KO) mice show rapid weight gain. Despite pronounced obesity, Ctrp10 KO female mice do not develop steatosis, dyslipidemia, glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, oxidative stress, or low-grade inflammation. Obesity is largely uncoupled from metabolic dysregulation in female KO mice. Multi-tissue transcriptomic analyses highlighted gene expression changes and pathways associated with insulin-sensitive obesity. Transcriptional correlation of the differentially expressed gene (DEG) orthologs in humans also shows sex differences in gene connectivity within and across metabolic tissues, underscoring the conserved sex-dependent function of CTRP10. Collectively, our findings suggest that CTRP10 negatively regulates body weight in females, and that loss of CTRP10 results in benign obesity with largely preserved insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. This female MHO mouse model is valuable for understanding sex-biased mechanisms that uncouple obesity from metabolic dysfunction.
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a powerful technology used to define the spatial distribution and relative abundance of metabolites across tissue cryosections. While software packages exist for pixel-by-pixel individual metabolite and limited target pairs of ratio imaging, the research community lacks an easy computing and application tool that images any metabolite abundance ratio pairs. Importantly, recognition of correlated metabolite pairs may contribute to the discovery of unanticipated molecules in shared metabolic pathways. Here, we describe the development and implementation of an untargeted R package workflow for pixel-by-pixel ratio imaging of all metabolites detected in an MSI experiment. Considering untargeted MSI studies of murine brain and embryogenesis, we demonstrate that ratio imaging minimizes systematic data variation introduced by sample handling, markedly enhances spatial image contrast, and reveals previously unrecognized metabotype-distinct tissue regions. Furthermore, ratio imaging facilitates identification of novel regional biomarkers and provides anatomical information regarding spatial distribution of metabolite-linked biochemical pathways. The algorithm described herein is applicable to any MSI dataset containing spatial information for metabolites, peptides or proteins, offering a potent hypothesis generation tool to enhance knowledge obtained from current spatial metabolite profiling technologies.