Impaired intestinal barrier function is thought to be a common major factor in food hypersensitivity, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), and colitis-associated cancer (CAC). Joan Heath and colleagues found that Gpa33–/– mice, which do not express the intestinal epithelium-specific cell surface glycoprotein A33 (GPA33), exhibited increased intestinal permeability and hypersensitivity to food antigens. Such alterations worsened upon exposure to dextran sodium sulphate (DSS), an intestinal luminal irritant, and led to the development of colitis in Gpa33–/– mice. Prior administration of azoxymethane (AOM; a colon-specific mutagen) induced CAC in DSS-treated Gpa33–/– mice but not in Gpa33–/– mice treated with AOM alone. Interestingly, human gene expression data showed that GPA33 RNA expression is reduced in the inflamed bowel of CD- and UC-affected individuals. Collectively, these data suggest a role for GPA33 in intestinal barrier function, which influences susceptibility to inflammatory intestinal pathologies. Gpa33–/– mice could be used to test the restoration of barrier function as a strategy to treat and prevent such pathologies. Page 805
- © 2015. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
Article navigation
Related articles
Cited by...
More in this TOC section
Similar articles
Other journals from The Company of Biologists
Editor’s Choice – Mild maternal hyperglycemia in INSC93S transgenic pigs causes impaired glucose tolerance and metabolic alterations in neonatal offspring
Simone Renner and colleagues used a transgenic pig model to show that mild hyperglycemia in insulin-mutant mothers results in poorer glucose tolerance and metabolic disturbances in the offspring, even wild-type ones.
In their article and accompanying poster, Martina Konantz and colleagues summarize the last 20 years of research in zebrafish models for hematopoietic disorders, highlighting how these models were created and are being applied for translational research.
A new Resource article from Susanne Sattler’s group describes a refined MRI technique to quantify acute hemorrhagic myocarditis in mice.
Have you seen our interviews with the early-career first authors of our papers? Recently, we caught up with Karishma Chhabria, Eleftheria Pervolaraki, Tamio Furuse, Hiroshi Mizuma, Katja Graf, Antonia Last and Monika Tomecka.
DMM joins the Review Commons initiative
Disease Models & Mechanisms is pleased to be a part of the new and exciting Review Commons initiative, launched by EMBO and ASAPbio. Streamlining the publishing process, Review Commons enables high-quality peer review to take place before journal submission. Papers submitted to Review Commons will be assessed independently of any journal, focusing solely on the paper’s scientific rigor and merit.
preLights – preLights reaches 500 posts!
The success of preLights is down to the hard work of our preLighters. Head over to the preLights website to find out more about our most active early-career-researchers.