Figure 1.

Study pipelineWorkflow of the entire study. Patients were asked to participate prior to their scheduled colonoscopy and were divided into groups: (a) colorectal cancer (CRC), (b) adenomas, (c) controls. A total of 1039 participants collected a fecal sample of which 12 were CRC. In addition, 21 adenoma and 21 controls were matched on age, body-mass index and smoking habits of which one control was excluded due to insufficient sample mass. The proteome, microbial and amino acid profiles were measured on each fecal sample. Databases were normalized. Principal component analysis was used to investigate distribution. The least absolute shrinkage selection operator and elastic net models were used to select most important markers. These markers were then combined to obtain novel accurate panels for CRC and adenoma detection. Pearson correlation was used to integrate features into a network model.