The earliest manifestation of epithelial ageing along the human colonic stem–progenitor hierarchy occurs in the progenitor compartment, with premature activation of this ageing programme in inflammatory bowel disease

This dataset contains normalised gene-expression counts and associated sample metadata for a study investigating ageing-associated transcriptional changes in FACS-sorted human sigmoid-colonic epithelial populations. Epithelial cells were separated into four populations along the stem–progenitor–differentiation continuum according to PTK7 and EPHB2 expression and profiled using SMART-Seq/SMART-Seq2 RNA sequencing. The deposited metadata include the variables required to reproduce the reported analyses, including donor age, sex, epithelial population and sequencing batch. Donors are represented by randomly generated pseudonymised study codes. These codes permit linkage of epithelial populations obtained from the same donor but contain no participant names or direct personal identifiers. The identifier key is retained securely by the study team and is not included in this deposit. The normalised expression matrix is intended to support reproduction of the visualizations and downstream analyses reported in the associated manuscript. The raw RNA-sequencing data have been deposited in the Genomics England (GEL) Research Environment and are available to approved researchers through the Genomics England Data Access process.