Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
We have identified Lgr5 as a facultative component of the Wnt receptor complex specifically expressed on cycling stem cells in the intestine, colon, stomach, hair-follicles, ovary and embryonic kidney. Using a 3D ex vivo culture system, freshly isolated Lgr5+ stem cells spontaneously generate self-organizing, self-renewing epithelial “organoids”, providing a physiological, renewable source of patient epithelia for both research and clinical applications. Employing in vivo clonal fate mapping strategies in the stomach, we further show that a balanced homeostasis of the glandular epithelium and stem cell pools is achieved via neutral competition between symmetrically dividing Lgr5+ stem cells. Long-term ablation of the Lgr5+ cell compartment in vivo severely impairs epithelial homeostasis in both the pyloric antrum and the corpus, establishing the Lgr5+ stem cell pool as being critical for daily maintenance of the gastric mucosa. We additionally characterize the transcriptomes Lgr5+ stem cells in mouse intestine, colon and stomach, revealing new gastric stem cell-specific markers that can be used to isolate human gastric stem cells for regenerative medicine applications and for use in selectively targeting cancer-causing mutations to the Lgr5+ stem cell compartment in mice as a means of evaluating their contribution to gastric cancer initiation and progression.
