IL6 and inflammatory bowel disease: As expected, the expression levels of two housekeeping genes, namely, glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) and actin beta (ACTB) were similar between IBD and control groups (Figure 2A), while the expression of four IBD feature genes, namely, lipocalin-2 (LCN2) (Cayatte et al., 2012), matrix metallopeptidase 9 (MMP9) (Farkas et al., 2015), interleukin 6 (IL6) (Atreya and Neurath, 2005), and S100 calcium-binding protein A12 (S100A12) (Nahidi et al., 2011) was highly elevated in CD and UC (Figure 2B).