EGFL6 and cancer: From this result, we believe EGFL6 expression may associate with cancer cell self-renewal, and colony forming ability is related to the cell self-renewal ability [24] (Fig. 3a, b), we further explored the mechanism of EGFL6 in keeping the cell stemness by detecting the expression of several associated genes, including POU class 5 homeobox 1 (POU5F1), NANOG, and LIN28. The mRNA level of POU5F1, NANOG, and LIN28 all had obvious reductions when EGFL6 was knocked down in both HCT116 and HT29 (Fig. 4d, e).