Description

This track shows data from Single-cell transcriptome analysis reveals differential nutrient absorption functions in human intestine. Droplet-based single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) was used to survey gene expression profiles of the epithelium in the human ileum, colon, and rectum. A total of 7 cell clusters were identified: enterocytes (EC), goblet cells (G), paneth-like cells (PLC), enteroendocrine cells (EEC), progenitor cells (PRO), transient-amplifying cells (TA) and stem cells (SC).

This track collection contains two bar chart tracks of RNA expression in colon cells where cells are grouped by cell type (Colon Cells) or donor (Colon Donor). The default track displayed is Colon Cells.

Display Conventions

The cell types are colored by which class they belong to according to the following table.

Cells that fall into multiple classes will be colored by blending the colors associated with those classes. Note that the Colon Donor track is colored by donor for improved clarity.

Method

Using scRNA-seq, RNA profiles of intestinal epithelial cells were obtained for 4,472 cells from two human colon samples. Tissue samples belonged to a male donor age 54 (Colon-1) and a female donor age 67 (Colon-2) both diagnosed with Adenocarcinoma. The healthy intestinal mucous membranes used for each sample were cut away from the tumor border in surgically removed ascending colon tissue. Additionally, the intestinal tissues were washed in Hank's balanced salt solution (HBSS) to remove mucus, blood cells, and muscle tissue. The sample was enriched for epithelial cells through centrifugation before being dissociated with Tryple to obtain single-cell suspensions. RNA-seq libraries were prepared using 10x Genomics 3' v2 kit and sequenced on an Illumina Hiseq X Ten PE150.

The cell/gene matrix and cell-level metadata was downloaded from the UCSC Cell Browser. The UCSC command line utility matrixClusterColumns, matrixToBarChart, and bedToBigBed were used to transform these into a bar chart format bigBed file that can be visualized. The coloring was done by defining colors for the broad level cell classes and then using another UCSC utility, hcaColorCells, to interpolate the colors across all cell types. The UCSC utilities can be found on our download server.

Data Access

The raw bar chart data can be explored interactively with the Table Browser, or the Data Integrator. For automated analysis, the data may be queried from our REST API. Please refer to our mailing list archives for questions, or our Data Access FAQ for more information.

Credit

Thanks to Yalong Wang, Wanlu Song, and to the many authors who worked on producing and publishing this data set. The data were integrated into the UCSC Genome Browser by Jim Kent and Brittney Wick then reviewed by Luis Nassar. The UCSC work was paid for by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

References

Wang Y, Song W, Wang J, Wang T, Xiong X, Qi Z, Fu W, Yang X, Chen YG. Single-cell transcriptome analysis reveals differential nutrient absorption functions in human intestine. J Exp Med. 2020 Feb 3;217(2). PMID: 31753849; PMC: PMC7041720