Fig. 5

Gene ontology and pathway analysis. a Gene Ontology analysis. Applying the WebGestalt tool [61] on 50 highly mutated coding genes in each subtype revealed several unique and common gene ontologies in the CRC subtypes. For example, “cellular response to interferon-gamma (GO:0071346)” is only associated to SC3. Also “Cell development (GO:0048468)” and “regulation of cell motility (GO:2000145)” ontologies are uniquely associated to SC7. A full list of ontology terms that were significantly associated with each subtype is provided in Additional file 1: Table S9. b Gene pathway analysis. Our gene pathway analysis also revealed 30 pathways that were associated with subtypes SC3, SC4, and SC6. Again, we identified several unique pathways associated to different subtypes. For example, SC4 has a unique pathway called “Signaling by FGFR3 point mutants in cancer” that has been previously associated with urothelial, breast, endometrial, squamous lung cancers and ovarian cancer [62]. More details about gene pathway analysis is provided as the Additional file 1: Table S9