mRNA sequencing of esophageal cells and columnar cells from different tissues

In this study, we used RNA sequencing to characterize esophageal progenitors following activation of the hedgehog (HH) pathway in vivo. We observed two main fates following activation of the HH pathway in the squamous epithelium: one population is in an intermediate state between squamous and columnar epithelium, and another achieves a full columnar conversion. We compared these 2 populations to different FACS sorted epithelial cells from different tissues of the gastro-intestinal tract (adult esophagus, embryonic esophagus, transition epithelium from the stomach, corpus of the stomach and small intestine). Our results suggest a multistep process in which esophageal progenitors first turn on a transcriptomic program that resembles the one from embryonic esophagus, then, a subset of these dedifferentiated cells can turn on a columnar differentiation program that shares similarities with intestinal cells. Collectively, these data demonstrate that some esophageal cells can be reprogrammed to generate columnar cells in vivo. Overall design: Oesophageal mRNA profiles of wild type (WT), K5SmoM2 and K5SmoM2-K8YFP mice by deep sequencing using Illumina