SLC1A5 and cancer: SLC1A5 is highly expressed in many cancers, including CRC (Deberardinis and Cheng, 2010), and plays an important role in supplying glutamine for energy production, autophagy, redox homeostasis, and activation of mTOR signaling, thereby promoting tumor growth (Hassanein et al., 2013; Willems et al., 2013; Huang et al., 2014; Marzi et al., 2016; van Geldermalsen et al., 2016).