Gene expression analysis in ulcerative colitis patients

Ulcerative colitis (UC) of which the pathogenesis is not yet fully elucidated is a disease that comes out as a result of an exaggerated immune response against environmental factors in genetically susceptible individuals. In this study, our aim was to identify the biomarkers that may be associated with the emergence and the progression of UC by putting forward the gene expression differences between the most inflamed region and normal colonic mucosa in UC patients. For this purpose, gene expression differences were analyzed between inflamed and normal colonic mucosa of 16 UC patients by using Differential Display-PCR (DD-PCR), a partial transcriptome analysis method. Among the differentially-expressed candidate transcripts, 3 were determined to span intronic regions of different genes. A more detailed analysis was carried out for one transcript among three. Firstly, Rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) was conducted in order to determine the flanking sequences and the 920 bp sequence flanking to 5'-end was determined by this method. A semi-quantitative expression analysis comparing the expression levels between inflamed and normal colonic mucosa was conducted, but there was no difference. Additionally, the expression of this transcript in various tissues and cancer cells was also confirmed by expression profiling by using commercially-available human RNA panel of 20 different tissues and 11 different cancer cell-lines. As a result of this study, a novel transcript which was not previously reported by any others was determined. The determination of the full-length of this transcript by using Northern Blot and the functional analyses is aimed for further studies.