Fig. 1
From: Organoid: a powerful tool to study lung regeneration and disease
Schematic of adult human and mouse lung stem cell-derived organoids. Human and mouse airway basal cells form tracheosphere or bronchosphere when cultured in 3D Matrigel (Rock et al., 2009; Danahay et al., 2015). Human and mouse AEC2s form alveolosphere with or without the support of fetal lung fibroblasts MRC5 (Barkauskas et al., 2013; Youk et al., 2020), whereas human AEC2s give rise to bronchiolar organoids in co-culture with adult human lung mesenchymal cells (AHLM) (Kathiriya et al., 2020b). In mouse distal airways, club cells and BASCs generate three distinct colony types when co-cultured with mesenchymal cells or mouse lung endothelial cells (LuMECs) (Lee et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2017). p63pos LNEPs form bronchiolar organoids, while p63neg LNEPs mainly form alveolar organoids (Xi et al., 2017; Kathiriya et al., 2020a; Cassandras et al., 2020). It remains to be determined whether there is stem/progenitor cell population in the distal human airways, as in mice