A high-throughput gut-on-chip platform to study the epithelial responses to enterotoxins

Enterotoxins are a type of toxins that primarily affect the intestines. Understanding their harmful effects is essential for food safety and medical research. Current methods lack high-throughput, robust, and translatable models capable of characterizing toxin-specific epithelial damage. Pressing co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2024-03, Vol.14 (1), p.5797-5797, Article 5797
Main Authors: Morelli, Moran, Cabezuelo Rodríguez, Marta, Queiroz, Karla
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/154/570
631/80/304
Actin
Bacterial Toxins - toxicity
Caco-2 Cells
Cell morphology
Cytology
Cytoskeleton
Cytotoxicity
Enterotoxins
Enterotoxins - toxicity
Epithelium
Food contamination
Food safety
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Intestinal Mucosa - pathology
Intestine
Medical research
Melitten - pharmacology
multidisciplinary
Nigericin
Nigericin - pharmacology
Ochratoxin A
Patulin
Permeability
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Toxins
Tubules
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Summary:Enterotoxins are a type of toxins that primarily affect the intestines. Understanding their harmful effects is essential for food safety and medical research. Current methods lack high-throughput, robust, and translatable models capable of characterizing toxin-specific epithelial damage. Pressing concerns regarding enterotoxin contamination of foods and emerging interest in clinical applications of enterotoxins emphasize the need for new platforms. Here, we demonstrate how Caco-2 tubules can be used to study the effect of enterotoxins on the human intestinal epithelium, reflecting toxins’ distinct pathogenic mechanisms. After exposure of the model to toxins nigericin, ochratoxin A, patulin and melittin, we observed dose-dependent reductions in barrier permeability as measured by TEER, which were detected with higher sensitivity than previous studies using conventional models. Combination of LDH release assays and DRAQ7 staining allowed comprehensive evaluation of toxin cytotoxicity, which was only observed after exposure to melittin and ochratoxin A. Furthermore, the study of actin cytoskeleton allowed to assess toxin-induced changes in cell morphology, which were only caused by nigericin. Altogether, our study highlights the potential of our Caco-2 tubular model in becoming a multi-parametric and high-throughput tool to bridge the gap between current enterotoxin research and translatable in vivo models of the human intestinal epithelium.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-024-56520-5