This news item from the Cornell Chronicle is about: Crohn’s disease (CD), a chronic inflammatory condition of the intestinal tract, has emerged as a global disease, with rates steadily increasing over the last 50 years. Experts have long suspected that CD likely represents a collection of related but slightly different disorders, but until now it has not been possible to predict accurately which subtype of CD a patient is likely to develop. In a study published Oct. 4 in the journal JCI Insight, Cornell and University of North Carolina researchers report they have pinpointed a single molecule – microRNA-31 (miR-31) – the levels of which predict whether a patient has subtype 1 or subtype 2 of the disease.