Abstract
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide. Different pathological pathways and molecular drivers have been described and some of the associated markers are used to select effective anti-neoplastic therapy. More recent evidence points to a causal role of microbiota and altered microRNA expression in CRC carcinogenesis, but their relationship with pathological drivers or molecular phenotypes is not clearly established. Joint analysis of clinical and omics data can help clarify such relations. We present ColPortal, a platform that integrates transcriptomic, microtranscriptomic, methylomic and microbiota data of patients with colorectal cancer. ColPortal also includes detailed information of histological features and digital histological slides from the study cases, since histology is a morphological manifestation of a complex molecular change. The current cohort consists of Caucasian patients from Europe. For each patient, demographic information, location, histology, tumor staging, tissue prognostic factors, molecular biomarker status and clinical outcomes are integrated with omics data. ColPortal allows one to perform multiomics analyses for groups of patients selected by their clinical data.
Highlights
Background & SummaryColorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in Europe and the third leading cause of death worldwide
The adenoma-carcinoma sequence of CRC carcinogenesis is typically characterized by distal colon location, chromosomal instability and microsatellite stability (MSS), leading, to the development of conventional colorectal carcinoma (CC) accounting for around 80% of CRC3
Less is known about the serrated carcinogenic pathway it has been associated with proximal colon location, female gender and having high-level of microsatellite instability (MSI-H)[2,4]
Summary
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in Europe and the third leading cause of death worldwide. Growing evidence points to a causative role of bacteria in the colorectal carcinogenic process[14,15] suggesting that different histological subtypes and locations of CRC would be explained by different bacteria populations whose relative composition depends on host diet and the anatomical portion of the colon[16]. By incorporating unpublished datasets on microbiome and microtranscriptome from our CRC series, our group has integrated this information with published methylome and transcriptome data[11,12,13] from the same cases to present here ColPortal, a free online platform to analyse multiomics and clinico-pathological features of CRC including digital histological images to help researchers unveil some pending questions, as explained above, related to colorectal carcinogenesis
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