Transcriptome-wide Differential Expression and Splicing in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients

Alternative splicing is a major contributor to transcriptomic changes in inflammatory bowel disease, with 491 differentially spliced genes in Crohn’s disease and 1,298 in ulcerative colitis.

• Why it matters: Broad expression changes are known in IBD, but how alternative splicing contributes to disease-associated molecular variation is less clear, especially across disease subtypes.
• What they did: The study integrated differential expression and differential splicing analyses in macroscopically uninvolved colonic mucosal biopsies from CD or UC patients and non-IBD controls, identifying DS and DE gene sets per subtype.
• The result: DS and DE genes were nearly mutually exclusive (no overlapping genes in CD; 16 in UC), with pathway programs distinct yet related, including extracellular vesicles and exosomes in CD and ER-to-Golgi trafficking and stress granules in UC.