#intestine

by Andres Rios

Digestive system. Traité de physiologie humaine. 1873.

Signs of Renewal

The gut lining is the most rapidly renewing tissue in the body. Distributed within the lining of epithelium are specialist Paneth cells which signal to intestinal stem cells leading to tissue renewal. Here, researchers deduce that stem cells optimise their receptiveness to the signals within this intestinal niche by orientating their Golgi apparatus [the cell's protein-processing organelles] laterally towards Paneth cells and organising their configuration – an ability which is compromised with ageing.

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Ilya Belevich and colleagues

Institute of Biotechnology, Helsinki Institute of Life Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Department of Cell and Molecular Biology (CMB), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, July 2026