CD44 and cancer: To assess whether, as observed for breast cancer (Gupta et al., 2011), commonly employed colon cancer cell lines encompass distinct differentiated and more stem-like subpopulations of cancer cells, we first analyzed a broad panel of cell lines by FACS with antibodies directed against different (cancer) stem cell markers (CD44, CD133, CD24, ALDEFLUOR) in combination with the epithelial marker EpCAM.