Date

April 18, 2026

Source

Nature

Categories

Clonal biases dictate availability of colonic cancer driver mutations for transformation

Data availability

The raw DNA amplicon-seq data generated in this study have been deposited in the NCBI database under accession code PRJNA1372027. The raw spatial transcriptomics data generated in this study have been deposited in the GEO database under accession code GSE312204. Processed data are available as supplementary data. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

All code for reproducing the analyses in this paper can be found at the GitLab repository https://gitlab.com/davidtourigny/crypt-clone-dynamics.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Histopathology, Genomics and Bioinformatics Core at the CRUK Cambridge Institute for their help with the project. This study was funded by the Wellcome Trust (D.J.W.: 103805, N.S.P.: 102160/Z/13/Z) and Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge (D.J.W.: A24456) and we would like to thank them for making the work possible.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CRUK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Nefeli Skoufou-Papoutsaki, Richard Kemp, Sam Adler, Anne-Claire Girard, Shenay Mehmed, Filipe C. Lourenço, Elisa B. Moutin & Douglas J. Winton

  2. Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Nefeli Skoufou-Papoutsaki & Douglas J. Winton

  3. Pathology and Data Analytics, Leeds Institute of Medical Research, University of Leeds School of Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Kate Marks

  4. Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Rogier Ten Hoopen

  5. MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, John Radcliffe Hospital, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Edward Morrissey

  6. School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    David S. Tourigny

Authors

  1. Nefeli Skoufou-Papoutsaki
  2. Richard Kemp
  3. Sam Adler
  4. Kate Marks
  5. Anne-Claire Girard
  6. Shenay Mehmed
  7. Filipe C. Lourenço
  8. Elisa B. Moutin
  9. Rogier Ten Hoopen
  10. Edward Morrissey
  11. Douglas J. Winton
  12. David S. Tourigny

Contributions

N.S.P.: conceptualisation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, validation, visualisation, writing-original draft and review/editing. R.K.: conceptualisation, methodology, data curation, formal analysis, software, visualisation. S.A.: investigation, methodology, validation. K.M.: resources, formal analysis. A.C.G.: project administration, data curation. S.M.: investigation. F.L.: supervision. E.B.M.: writing-review and editing. R.T.H.: resources, project administration. E.M.: software. D.J.W.: conceptualisation, funding acquisition, supervision, writing-original draft and review/editing. D.S.T.: methodology, software, visualisation, writing-original draft and review/editing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Douglas J. Winton or David S. Tourigny.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Communications thanks Hugo Snippert and the other anonymous reviewer for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.

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Skoufou-Papoutsaki, N., Kemp, R., Adler, S. et al. Clonal biases dictate availability of colonic cancer driver mutations for transformation. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71944-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71944-5