Fig. 3.

Deconvolution of mucosal transcriptomes demonstrates cellular remodeling during inflammation. A MuSiC cell deconvolution package was used to estimate ratios of the most abundant cell types based on the sigmoid colon mucosal patient transcriptomes. Notably, epithelial cell abundance is decreasing with inflammation, whereas abundances of macrophages and B cells, the two most frequent immune cell types that combine for approximately 35% proportion, are increasing with inflammation severity. Therefore, cell deconvolution supports the candidate gene analyses indicating mucosal cellular remodeling characterized by a reduction of epithelial cells and an expansion of immune cells with increasing inflammation severity. B HK2 expression increases with inflammation scores after normalization to epithelial cell abundance. The red lines represent the mean expression trendline with the grey area indicating its 95% confidence interval. The number in the upper left/right corner represents the p value for the correlation between gene expression and inflammation score as determined by linear mixed model