GI highlights from the literature

Basic scienceRedefining liver zonation

 Bahar Halpern K, Shenhav R, Matcovitch–Natan O, et al. Single-cell spatial reconstruction reveals global division of labour in the mammalian liver Nature 2017;542:352–6.

Hepatocytes in distinct anatomical locations within the liver lobule are thought to have specialised functions, a paradigm termed liver zonation. In this study, the authors use singlemolecule fluorescence in situ hybridisation and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to define exhaustively the zonation profiles of all liver genes in mice. Using a panel of six zonally distributed genes (Glul, Cyp2e1, Ass1, Asl, Alb, Cyp2f2), they defined a 'spatial barcode', whereby the relative expression of these zonal genes could infer the location of a given cell within one of nine lobule layers between the central vein and portal node. They proceeded to perform scRNA-seq on freshly isolated hepatocytes and used expression levels of the spatial barcode genes to assign each sequenced hepatocyte to...

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