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Coculture of intestinal bacteria with primary human intestinal epithelium provides a valuable tool for investigating host-colon bacterial interactions and for testing and screening therapeutics. However, most current intestinal model systems lack key physiological features of the in vivo colon, such as both a proper oxygen microenvironment and a mucus layer. In this work, a new in vitro colonic microphysiological system is demonstrated with a cell-derived, functional mucus that closely resembles the in vivo colonic mucosa and apical microenvironment by employing an anaerobic air-liquid interface culture. The human primary colon epithelial cells in this new in vitro system exhibit high cell viability (>98%) with ≈100 μm thick functional mucus layer on average. Successful coculture of model anaerobic gut bacterial strains
Kim et al. (Wed,) studied this question.