Current and emerging approaches to define intestinal epithelium-specific transcriptional networks

Upon developmental or environmental cues, the composition of transcription factors in a transcriptional regulatory network is deeply implicated in controlling the signature of the gene expression and thereby specifies the cell- or tissue-type. Novel methods including ChIP-chip and ChIP-Seq have been applied to analyse known transcription factors and their interacting regulatory DNA elements in the intestine. The intestine is an example of a dynamic tissue where stem cells in the crypt proliferate and undergo a differentiation process towards the villus. During this differentiation process, specific regulatory networks of transcription factors are activated to target specific genes, which determine the intestinal cell fate. The expanding genome-wide mapping of transcription factor binding sites and construction of transcriptional regulatory networks provide new insight into how intestinal differentiation is occurring. This review summarizes the current overview of the transcriptional regulatory networks driving the intestinal epithelial differentiation in adult. The novel technologies that have been implied to study these networks are presented and their prospects for implications in future research are also addressed.