Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications
Forkhead box transcription factors Foxa1 and Foxa2 are important regulators of Muc2 mucin expression in intestinal epithelial cells
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Animals. Pregnant Balb/c mice (Charles River, Maastricht, The Netherlands) were housed as in [16]. Pregnant females were sacrificed by cervical dislocation, embryos were isolated and the intestine was excised at embryonic (E)15.5, E17.5, E18.5, and postnatal (P)1.5 days and adults. The small intestine was fixed in 4% paraformaldehyde in PBS and prepared for light microscopy. All experiments were performed with the approval of the Animal Studies Ethics Committee of the Erasmus Medical Centre
Foxa1 and Foxa2 are expressed in Muc2-expressing goblet cells of the mouse small intestine
Immunohistochemical studies performed on developing and adult mouse small intestine, showed that Muc2 was not detectable at E15.5 (Fig. 1A). As from E17.5, goblet cells expressed the mucin Muc2 (Fig. 1C, E, and H).
At E15.5, Foxa1 protein was uniformly expressed by all cells in the developing gut (not shown), whereas Foxa2 expression was restricted to the pseudostratified epithelium (Fig. 1B). Foxa1 was expressed by all epithelial and goblet cells in developing crypts and villi, with a slight
Acknowledgments
We thank C. Chauvin, M.-P. Ducourouble and M.H.M. Melis for their technical help. We thank Dr. J.K. Divine (Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA) for the kind gift of pHD-Foxa1 and pHD-Foxa2 expression vectors and Dr. S. Cereghini for the kind gift of pMT2-Gata-4 vector (UMR7622 CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France).
This work was supported by grants from the Sophia Foundation for Medical Research (MVDS), INSERM/ZonMw-NWO (IVS, IBR) and l′Association Francois Aupetit (IVS).
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Both authors contributed equally to this work.