AI and the World's Hard Problems · Medicine & drug discovery · Nature (computational biology) · 2026-10-24
Metabolic syndrome and colorectal cancer share GPAT3 and PLAU as candidate genes: Mendelian randomisation, machine learning, single-cell knockout and docking
The direction of the link between metabolic syndrome and colorectal cancer, and the genes connecting them, were unresolved. The team combined Mendelian randomisation, machine-learning prioritisation, single-cell virtual knockout and docking analyses. The results supported a causal effect from metabolic syndrome to colorectal cancer and nominated GPAT3 and PLAU as candidate genes for testing.