Equine exfoliome

Evaluating the health and function of the gastrointestinal tract can be challenging in all species, but is especially difficult in horses due to their size and length of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Isolation of mRNA of cells exfoliated from the gastrointestinal mucosa into feces (i.e., the exfoliome) offers a novel means of non-invasively examining the gene expression profile of the GI mucosa. The objective of this study was to characterize the gene expression profile found in exfoliated intestinal epithelial cells from normal horses and compare the exfoliome data with the tissue mucosal transcriptome.