| Summary: | Ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD) are characterized by an imbalance between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines, interfering with the resolution of inflammation. Due to the crucial role of cytokines, new insights into their profiles in UC and CD would help to improve our understanding of pathogenesis and enable the development of new treatment modalities. We provide an expression profile of cytokines in UC and CD, using bioinformatics approach, and experimental validation of expression of the selected genes. We retrieved data and analyzed the cytokine gene expression profiles of UC and CD. From ten genes with inverse expression, common to CD and UC, <i>BMP8B</i>, <i>LEFTY1</i> and <i>INSL5</i> were selected for gene expression experimental validation. Experimentally, <i>BMP8B</i> and <i>INSL5</i> were down-regulated in both CD and UC but followed the bioinformatics trend. The expression of genes <i>LEFTY1</i> and <i>BMP8B</i> was statistically significant when comparing UC and CD in colon and the expression of gene <i>LEFTY1</i> showed statistical significance when CD in ileum and colon were compared. Using the bioinformatics approach and experimental validation, we found differences in expression profiles between UC and CD for <i>INSL5</i>, <i>LEFTY1</i> and <i>BMP8B</i>. These three promising candidate genes need to be further explored at different levels, such as DNA methylation and protein expression, to provide more evidence on their potential diagnostic role in CD and UC.
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