On October 13, Professor Jingxin Li, in Professor Chuanyong Liu's team published a research paper entitled Androgen Maintains Intestinal Homeostasis by Inhibiting BMP Signaling via Intestinal Stromal Cells in Stem Cell Reports. Professor Jingxin Li, the Department of Physiology and Pathophysiology, and Dr. Dawei Chen of the Institute of Giga, University of Liege, Belgium, are co-authors of the paper. The co-first authors of this paper are Xin Yu, a postgraduate student of School of Basic Medical Sciences, Shandong University, Shiguang Li, a postgraduate student from Hospital of Reproductive Medicine Affiliated to Shandong University,  and Yiming Xu, a postgraduate student from Peking Union Medical College Hospital & Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

The cover picture uses the traditional Chinese Taiji yin-yang diagram to represent the sexual dimorphism of the steady-state regulation of intestinal stem cells. In this study, we found that androgen can promote the proliferation of intestinal stem cells, but inhibit the differentiation into mature epithelial cells, which provides a possible explanation for the high incidence of colon cancer in men.

Link of the paper: https://www.cell.com/stem-cell-reports/issue?pii=S2213-6711(19)X0011-9