1. 3. Bowel assays & crc risk:
1. Sample collectioN:
Normal colorectal mucosa from endoscopic procedures at the John Radcliffe hospital.
- Patients given informed consent
- COLlected 10ml blood and/or colorectal biopsies
- Biopsies freshly used to extract DNA + RNA
- remaining tissue snap frozen
2. ASSAY OPTIMIZATION:
DNA
- EXTRACTION AND QC
- 23 Risk SNPS  polygenic risk score(PRs)
- telomere length (tl)
RNA
- retrotranscription and DNAse treatment
- pathway expression analysis (pea)
BLOOD
- NUCLEATED CELL SEPARATION
- DNA EXTRACTION AND QC
- RNA EXTRACTION AND QC
colorectal biopsies
- tissue fragmentation &
homogenisation  
3. Bowel assays & crc risk:
compared levels of 3 assays in a group of healthy controls vs. patients with polyps/CRC
- 2-stage design: pilot50 (50 cases & 50 controls)
phase2 (182 cases & 57 controls)
- cases showed longer tl than controls (OR=1.106; p=0.025)
- cases presented with higher number of risk alleles (p=0.007; OR=1.086)
4. Blood assays:
analyze correlation between bowel markers and their blood counterparts
- blood tl was significantly correlated with bowel tl
- BLOOD TL could be used as a proxy for risk
assessment in a quick and less invasive way