Biomaterials
Biomaterials
5 years ago

Live cell imaging of mouse intestinal organoids reveals heterogeneity in their oxygenation

Live cell imaging of mouse intestinal organoids reveals heterogeneity in their oxygenation
Intestinal organoids are widely applied in stem cell research, regenerative medicine, toxicology, pharmacology, and host-microbe interactions research. The variability of oxidative metabolism for stem and differentiated cell types constituting organoid is known to be important but so far it has not been studied in details. Here, we report the use of live cell microscopy of oxygen via the phosphorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (PLIM) method to address the oxygenation and variability of aerobic metabolism of individual organoids in the culture. Using the cell-penetrating phosphorescent O2-sensitive probe, we found inhomogeneous O2 distribution in live organoids, with areas of relatively high oxygenation (up to 73 μM in organoid compared to an average 40 μM O2) and trans-epithelial O2 microgradients (up to 0.6–0.83 μM/μm). We also demonstrated that intestinal organoid culture consists of units with different respiration activity and oxygenation (from 27 to 92 μM, equal to 2.8–9.7% O2), depending on age of the culture and drug treatment. Collectively, our results indicate that ignoring the metabolic heterogeneity of organoid culture can be critical for proper data interpretation. The live cell imaging PLIM method demonstrates a clear advantage of using individual organoids as separate experimental units rather than ‘bulk’ organoid cultures.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0142961217305628

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.