'Colon Cluster'

Medium: digital Abstract 

Artist's Narrative 

        "Colon cluster" is a digital art piece which draws its inspiration from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) UMAP clusters of the colon, which track cell identity groupings. In these comprehensive cell maps, the colors correspond to the cell identity, creating abstract, amorphous shapes, which in this piece, fuse into the colon appearance. The colors themselves mirror traditional heatmaps that create cross sections to view through the layers of inflamed tissues of the gastrointestinal system in inflammatory bowel disease. The radiating colors fuse together to create the piece's overall identity and observation. 

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Abstract 

By Jeeya Sharma 

           Pediatric Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) that impact child health and growth. Recent studies have used single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology in order to better understand cellular mechanisms of IBD pathology. Current scRNA-seq protocols can be further assessed to evaluate how generalizable scRNA-seq results are to the cell populations that make up a given tissue sample. We explore the capacities of scRNA to represent cell populations of a given gut biopsy sample through bulk RNA sequencing (bulk RNA-seq) analysis and characterization of unsequenced cellular debris from scRNA sample processing. Preliminary RNA extractions have been collected, and future steps may involve pooling biopsies together to increase RNA yields to sequenceable amounts to characterize the RNA.