Transcriptomic profile of intestinal epithelial cells obtained from ileal endoscopic biopsies from newly-diagnosed, pediatric Crohn's disease patients and healthy controls.

Purpose: To uncover differentially-regulated transcripts and pathways/biological processes in newly-diagnosed, pediatric Crohn's disease in comparison to healthy controls. Methods: Intestinal epithelial cells were dissociated from ileal endoscopic biopsies, and stored at -80C in RNAlater. The polyA RNA fraction was purified, and single-end, 50 bp reads were sequenced and aligned to the Hg19 genome using the TopHat2 aligner. Differential analysis was performed using Bioconductor packages including edgeR, where significance was defined as p<0.05 and fold change>2. Results: We obtained 15788 reasonably-expressed transcripts that were included in differential analyses. Conclusions: Our study characterizes the dysregulation of intestinal epithelial cells in treatment-naïve Crohn's disease using RNA sequencing for transcriptomic profile of cells obtained through ileal endoscopic biopsies. mRNA profiles of intestinal epithelial cells obtained from newly-diagnosed ileal biopsies in healthy controls and newly-diagnosed Crohn's disease.