Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) show a great deal of variation in terms of which symptoms they manifest, how severe these symptoms are, how disease progresses, and whether they respond to particular treatments. This indicates that not all cases of IBD are the same. There is an urgent need for clinicians to understand and classify these different forms of IBD in order to give patients accurate information and to select the best treatment option. Our lab has investigated this variation between patients by focusing on inflammation genes that are similar between humans and other species. We use this approach because genes that are more important are more likely to be “conserved” (remain the same) during evolution. In our previous studies, we used evolutionary conserved genes to group Caucasian patients with ulcerative colitis (UC, a form of IBD) into two groups, designated UC1 and UC2. These groups may be important for clinical management of patients, as a higher proportion of UC2 patients responded to medication compared with UC1 patients. UC1 patients also expressed other genes that have been associated with reduced response to medication. In this project, using single cell RNA seq we aim to profile UC1 and UC2 as well as healthy individuals.