Colorectal cancers develop in a multistage process from polyploid adenomas to carcinomas and more advanced disease stages. Increasingly, some bacterial species in the gastrointestinal microbiota have been linked to colorectal cancer development. Yachida et al. mapped the fecal micro biome contents of 616 individuals undergoing colonoscopy. They found significant increases of specific bacterial species with different stages of colorectal cancer, indicating that these might be biomarkers of disease that can be used in diagnosis.
