Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease (1), is a significant cause of morbidity and economic burden in the United States (2, 3, 4). We performed differential gene expression analyses and identified the interleukin-1 (IL-1) receptor antagonist, IL1RN (5, 6), as among the genes most differentially expressed in the blood and regulatory T-cells of patients with Crohn’s disease using published (7) and public datasets (8). Further analysis of published microarray data (9) revealed that IL1RN was transcriptionally induced upon stimulation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) with muramyl dipeptide, the ligand for the gene product of the Crohn’s disease susceptibility locus NOD2. Interestingly, IL-1RN was expressed at significantly lower quantities in the Treg of patients with Crohn’s disease than in the Treg of non-affected control subjects. This is the first report of differential expression of IL1RN in patients with Crohn’s disease.
Gene expression of delta-6-desaturase in peripheral blood mononuclear cells, β7+ and β7− lymphocytes in healthy controls and patients with Crohn's disease
