Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic illness that affects the digestive tract. It includes two subtypes, Ulcerative Colitis (UC) and Crohn's Colitis (CC). CC is a subset of Crohn’s Disease that is localized to the large intestine. CC, specifically, and UC are commonly  misdiagnosed. One promising preliminary discovery to help improve diagnostics is that the expression of innate immune peptide, human alpha defensin-5 (HD5) is elevated significantly in Crohn's Colitis patients versus Ulcerative Colitis patients by as much as 118 fold. Our current study has two aims in studying the effect of this HD5 overexpression. We have preliminary data indicating that HD5 is impairing wound healing in colonic epithelial cells. Therefore, we would first like to measure the wound healing capability in NCM460 cells of the colon in response to HD5. Secondly, we would like to further measure the protein expression of VTN (Vitronectin), WISPI, and Wnt5a in NCM460 cells after exposure to HD5. This will be done with qPCR and Western Blots to look at the expression of these important wound healing proteins. Based on the preliminary data around HD5 and Crohn’s Colitis patients, we know that HD5 decreases wound healing in the colon. So, we expect the HD5 peptide to decrease colonic wound healing in a dose-dependent manner. A preliminary wound healing array has also shown an increase in VTN, WISPI, and Wnt5a as the levels of HD5 rose.  We expect our qPCR and western blot studies to validate this data. These experiments are important to elucidate the role of HD5 in CC, hopefully giving us more mechanistic insight to CC pathogenesis, which could lead to better treatments of the disease.