Figure 5.

Comparison of human fecal MUC2 from healthy and Crohn’s Disease samples. A, tiled cross-section of human feces from healthy persons or Crohn’s Disease (CD) patients dual-stained with FISH probes (red) and an AF488-conjugated mouse monoclonal antibody targeting human MUC2 (see Methods; green). The dotted line denotes the boundary of the image. B, quantitative imaging of mucus thickness along distance of fecal periphery. C, Violin plot of total mucus thickness of four independent healthy and CD samples. D, confocal imaging of MUC2:FISH-stained sections. Right of image: Density plots of mucus thickness and microbial distance to mucus bottom showing microbial penetration into the mucus.