METTL3 (Ouyang et al., 2024[184]; Jiang et al., 2024[108]; Deng et al., 2019[45]), FTO (Qiao et al., 2024[195]; Ye et al., 2023[322]), ALKBH5 (Zhai et al., 2023[333]; Ye et al., 2023[322]), and YTHDF2 (Qiao et al., 2024[195]; Chen et al., 2020[27]; Shen et al., 2023[207]) may have different mechanisms to exhibit oncogenic and anti-oncogenic roles in colorectal cancer. The gene discussed is ALKBH5; the disease is colorectal cancer.