Delineating inflammatory bowel disease through transcriptomic studies: current review of progress and evidence

Abstract

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which comprises of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, is an idiopathic relapsing and remitting disease in which the interplay of different environment, microbial, immunological and genetic factors that attribute to the progression of the disease. Numerous studies have been conducted in multiple aspects including clinical, endoscopy and histopathology for the diagnostics and treatment of IBD. However, the molecular mechanism underlying the aetiology and pathogenesis of IBD is still poorly understood. This review tries to critically assess the scientific evidence at the transcriptomic level as it would help in the discovery of RNA molecules in tissues or serum between the healthy and diseased or different IBD subtypes. These molecular signatures could potentially serve as a reliable diagnostic or prognostic biomarker. Researchers have also embarked on the study of transcriptome to be utilized in targeted therapy. We focus on the evaluation and discussion related to the publications reporting the different approaches and techniques used in investigating the transcriptomic changes in IBD with the intention to offer new perspectives to the landscape of the disease.

A four-decade analysis of the incidence trends, sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of inflammatory bowel disease patients at single tertiary centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

“…However, it is exciting that the non-existence of family history of IBD or CRC among our 12 UC-related neoplasia patients, further affirmed that familial penetrance was lacking even among patients with the aggressive spectrum of UC in this region. It is worth investigating the possible gene dysregulation in different disease duration IBD [34].…”

Biological impact of mutually exclusive exon switching

“…Alternative splicing is common in humans and other animals producing different transcripts in different developmental stages, tissues or disease states [ 1 , 2 ]. Alternative splicing events have been linked to various diseases and cancers [ 3 – 6 ] and may lead to the tissue-specific rewiring of protein-protein networks [ 7 – 9 ]. A biologically meaningful role for many AS events has been demonstrated [ 10 – 12 ], but the extent to which AS extends the functional repertoire is a subject of considerable active debate in the literature [ 13 , 14 ].…”

Colonic Mucosal Transcriptomic Changes in Patients with Long-Duration Ulcerative Colitis Revealed Colitis-Associated Cancer Pathways

“…Some of these studies have also been previously reviewed. 11 However, to date, the effects of different disease duration on transcriptome have yet to be explored. The type of colon cancer that is preceded by clinically detectable IBD is called colitis-associated cancer [CAC].…”