Novel Calcium Transport Pathways Mediate Intestinal Calcium Absorption Pre‐Weaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Calcium is essential to many vital physiological functions including bone mineralization. Peak bone deposition rate occurs in infancy and maximal bone mineral content is achieved early in adulthood, thereafter bone mass is lost. Maintenance of a positive calcium balance during development is thus essential to achieving optimal bone mass. Calcium homeostasis is mediated by interactions between the intestine, kidneys, and bones. Intestinal absorption occurs by either an active transcellular or passive paracellular pathway. Currently, based on studies in adults the duodenum is thought to be a site of largely transcellular absorption whereas the jejunum and ileum are proposed to mediate exclusively paracellular calcium absorption. There are limited studies on young animals. We therefore set out to describe calcium absorption pathways pre and post weaning. Wildtype FVB/N mice at 7 ages from 1 day to 6 months old were examined. Levels of Trpv6 and CalbD9k mRNA, mediators of transcellular calcium transport, increased six‐fold between two weeks and one month of age in the duodenum with a corresponding increase in Calbindin D9k protein. In the jejunum and ileum, mediators of transcellular transport – Trpv6 (jejunum only) , Ca v 1.3 , and CalbD9k – are highly expressed prior to weaning, suggesting novel pathways of calcium absorption during development. Consistent with this, net calcium flux, measured in Ussing chambers, was not different from zero across ileum post weaning. However, we identified significant net absorption in the absence of an electrochemical gradient across ileum prior to weaning. Further, this net absorption was abolished by nifedipine, an L‐type calcium channel blocker. Abundance of Cldn‐2 and ‐15 mRNA, mediators of paracellular absorption, peak at 7 days in the duodenum. In the ileum, Cldn‐ 2 mRNA peaks at 14 days and decreases 10‐fold by 1 month, whereas Cldn‐15 expression increases 3‐fold from day 14 to 1 month of age. In conclusion, these observations suggest that weaning induces a significant shift from paracellular to transcellular calcium absorption in the duodenum and that there is significant, previously unreported, transcellular calcium absorption from the jejunum and ileum pre weaning mediated by Cav1.3. Support or Funding Information This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Stollery Children's Hospital Foundation through the Women and Children's Health Research Institute
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".