Messed-up metabolism during development may lead guts to coil the wrong way

Inside the African clawed frog, intestines grow just like humans’: neatly coiled counterclockwise. Experiments now show how that process can go awry.

Interfering with tadpoles’ metabolism leads to a chain of cellular disruptions that causes their intestines to grow in the wrong direction, researchers from North Carolina State University in Raleigh report February 19 in Development. Their findings offer new insight into how a similar birth anomaly in humans, known as intestinal malrotation, may occur.