Figure 2

Gut relaxation. (A) The relaxation of the same representative gastrointestinal tract kept in PBS at 4°C and photographed at 0, 2, 4, and 13 days after dissection. Abbreviations: s, stomach; c, coecum; r, rectum; scale bar is 1 cm. (B) The relaxation of five guts (measured from the pylorus of the stomach to the coecum) kept in PBS at 4°C and measured over the course 34 days. The dashed line represents the theoretical relaxation (Eq. 2) of a gut with the initial length of 150 mm. (C) The relationship between the current gut length and the increase in gut length per day. The data points were obtained from the five guts used in (b); for better precision of the linear regression (line), only the initial 6 days were included in the analysis. The rate of relaxation was calculated as the absolute difference in length between the current day and the next day.