JUN promotes abdominal adhesions in mice and humans

Adhesions are fibrotic scars that form between abdominal organs following surgery or infection, and may cause bowel obstruction, chronic pain, or infertility. Adhesions occur post-operatively in 50-90% of all open abdominal operations and as such, represent an enormous clinical problem impacting hundreds of millions of patients worldwide. Our understanding of the biology of adhesion formation is very limited, which explains why there are essentially no available treatments that prevent adhesions. In this study, we systemically analyzed abdominal adhesions in mouse and human tissues gene expression using bulk- and sc-RNA-seq technologies to characterize the fibroblasts responsible for this devastating pathology. Overall design: Mouse and human abdominal adhesion tissue transcriptomes were profiled using single cell RNA-sequencing. A total of 4 human samples and 2 pooled mouse samples were profiled.