A new way to grow an epithelium: publication in eLife
The output of our long-standing collaboration with the Buchon lab at Cornell University, and David Duneau at Toulouse/IGC, is now out in eLife. This project has been brewing since 2013, led for most of its life by Alessandro Bonfini.
We explore how the (fly) midgut grows and shrinks plastically in response to qualitative dietary variation. There were lots of surprises on the way, leading us to conclude that enterocytes and ISCs work together to hit a gut target size, and the results imply that enterocytes can even pick up the slack if ISC proliferation is deficient. This suggests that enterocyte resizing is a significant but previously unappreciated factor in determining nutrient homeostasis.