For example, the trend of significantly high expression of MAL2 in rectal cancer cells was found to be associated with poor patient prognosis (Li et al., 2017), while the expression of the CSMD family was shown to be a predictor of CRC (Zhang and Song, 2014), and KNL1 was associated with reducing apoptosis and promoting proliferation of CRC cells (Bai et al., 2019). Here, KNL1 is linked to rectal cancer.