TM9SF4 and rectal cancer: In our study, we found adjacent gene group, TM9SF4, POFUT1, PLAGL2, KIF3B and ASXL1 can share 9 common predicted miRNAs, especially the significantly correlated gene pair POFUT1 and PLAGL2 share common 52 microRNAs with experimental evidence, and these microRNAs can directly target PLAGL2 and POFUT1 and repress the expression of both genes in colon and rectal cancer, which indicate that ceRNA may be another important mechanism causing co-expression of these adjacent genes.