Colorectal cancer articles from across Nature Portfolio

Experiments using DNA barcoding for lineage tracing in mouse models of colorectal cancer reveal polyclonal origins of premalignant lesions, with a transition to monoclonality as they progress to the advanced tumour.

Multicolour lineage tracing and mutagenesis studies in a mouse model show that many intestinal tumours are polyclonal, with multiple clones exhibiting independent Apc mutations driven by differences in KRAS and MYC signalling.

Colorectal cancer metastasis involves dramatic plasticity and loss of PROX1-mediated repression of non-intestinal lineages.

Using a multipurpose, single-cell CRISPR platform, we demonstrate precise timing of tissue-specific cell expansion during mouse embryonic development, unconventional developmental relationships between cell types, new epithelial progenitor states and insights into precancer initiation by leveraging genetic histories.

Snyder and colleagues present a comprehensive multiomic atlas of normal mucosal, benign polyps and dysplastic polyps from six persons with familial adenomatous polyposis, comprising transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and lipidomic datasets.

A mini-colon device mimics colorectal tumors and their interactions with neighboring healthy tissue, stromal cells and immune cells.

Western lifestyles cause a low-grade but chronic and metabolic inflammation (or metaflammation), which might prime committed cell lineages to initiate colon tumorigenesis. At-risk individuals might include cases of early-onset colon cancer, the incidence of which has risen dramatically in the past few decades.

Relentless accumulation of somatic mutations renders mismatch repair (MMR)-deficient cancers immunogenic. The evolutionary strategies that these hypermutator tumors use to drive immune evasion remain unknown. We identify repetitive homopolymer sequences in MMR genes as genetic ON/OFF switches, which vary mutation rate and bias during tumor evolution to fuel intratumor heterogeneity.