Unlimited expansion of intestinal stem cells from a wide range of ages.

The recent technical advance in cloning and culturing ground-state intestinal stem cells (ISC) provides us an opportunity of accurate assessment of age-related impact on the function of highly proliferative intestinal stem cells. Our ability of indefinitely and robustly expanding single-stem-cell derived pedigrees allows us to study intestinal stem cells at the clonal level. Interestingly, comparable number of ISC clones was yielded from 1mm endoscopic biopsy of all donors despite the age.