The Regenerative Altruism of Hepatocytes and Cholangiocytes

In this issue of Cell Stem Cell and recently in Nature, Deng et al. (2018) and Schaub et al. (2018) (respectively) demonstrate that following acute liver injury, hepatocytes and cholangiocytes restore liver mass and function. When proliferative capacity of either cell type is impaired, the other cell type will transdifferentiate to restore full regeneration and hepatic histology.