Interleukin‐18 disrupts tight junctions in gastric and intestinal epithelial monolayers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic inflammatory conditions of the gut including Helicobacter pylori gastritis and the inflammatory bowel diseases ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease are characterized by compromised epithelial barrier function and tight junction alterations. Both conditions are associated with increased mucosal levels of the proinflammatory cytokine interleukin‐18 (IL‐18). The role of IL‐18 in epithelial barrier defects has yet to be investigated. AIM This study assessed the effect of IL‐18 on gastric and intestinal epithelial barrier structure and function. RESULTS Human gastric (HGE‐20) and colonic (Caco‐2) epithelial monolayers challenged with IL‐18 showed redistribution of tight junctional proteins claudin‐4 and occludin. This was accompanied by a matrix metalloproteinase‐9 independent decrease in claudin‐4 and occludin expression. Despite disrupting epithelial tight junction structure, IL‐18 treatment did not affect apical‐to‐basolateral fluxes of 3000MW FITC‐dextran, suggesting no effect of IL‐18 on transepithelial permeability to small molecules. CONCLUSION These findings demonstrate that IL‐18 disrupts epithelial barrier structure in gastric and intestinal monolayers without affecting transepithelial permeability. Future studies will assess the significance of IL‐18 ‐mediated tight junction disruption with respect to leukocyte transmigration across epithelia. Funded by CIHR.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".