Distinct hepatocyte identities in liver homeostasis and regeneration

The process of metabolic liver zonation is spontaneously established by assigning distributed tasks to hepatocytes along the porto-central blood flow. Hepatocytes fulfil critical metabolic functions, while also maintaining hepatocyte mass by replication when needed. Recent technological advances have enabled us to fine-tune our understanding of hepatocyte identity during homeostasis and regeneration. Subsets of hepatocytes have been identified to be more regenerative and some have even been proposed to function like stem cells, challenging the long-standing view that all hepa-tocytes are similarly capable of regeneration. The latest data show that hepatocyte renewal during homeostasis and regeneration after liver injury is not limited to rare hepatocytes; however, hepa-tocytes are not exactly the same. Herein, we review the known differences that give individual hepatocytes distinct identities, recent findings demonstrating how these distinct identities corre-spond to differences in hepatocyte regenerative capacity, and how the plasticity of hepatocyte identity allows for division of labour among hepatocytes. We further discuss how these distinct hepatocyte identities may play a role during liver disease.& COPY; 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).