Transcriptome-wide Analysis Reveals Hallmarks of Human Intestine Development and Maturation In Vitro and In Vivo

Human intestinal organoids (HIOs) are a tissue culture model in which small intestine-like tissue is generated from pluripotent stem cells. By carrying out unsupervised hierarchical clustering of RNA-sequencing data, we demonstrate that HIOs most closely resemble human fetal intestine. We observed that genes involved in digestive tract development are enriched in both fetal intestine and HIOs compared to adult tissue, whereas genes related to digestive function and Paneth cell host defense are expressed at higher levels in adult intestine. Our study also revealed that the intestinal stem cell marker OLFM4 is expressed at very low levels in fetal intestine and in HIOs, but is robust in adult crypts. We validated our findings using in vivo transplantation to show that HIOs become more adult-like after transplantation. Our study emphasizes important maturation events that occur in the intestine during human development and demonstrates that HIOs can be used to model fetal-to-adult maturation. •HIOs derived from hPSCs remain fetal in vitro•HIOs become adult-like when transplanted into mice•Transcriptional profiling across time reveals hallmarks of human gut maturation•The intestinal stem cell protein OLFM4 is a marker of human crypt maturation Human pluripotent stem cell-derived intestinal organoids (HIOs) are an in vitro model of the small intestine. Spence and colleagues used transcriptional profiling to demonstrate that HIOs remain fetal in vitro and show that they undergo maturation into adult-like tissue when transplanted in vivo. Their results demonstrate that HIOs are a valuable in vitro model to study the fetal intestine.