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Current clinical strategy for staging and prognostication of colorectal cancer (CRC) relies mainly upon the TNM or Duke system. This clinicopathological stage is a crude prognostic guide because it reflects in part the delay in diagnosis in the case of an advanced cancer and gives little insight into the biological characteristics of the tumor. We hypothesized that global metabolic profiling (metabonomics/metabolomics) of colon mucosae would define metabolic signatures that not only discriminate malignant from normal mucosae, but also could distinguish the anatomical and clinicopathological characteristics of CRC. We applied both high-resolution magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (HR-MAS NMR) and gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC/MS) to analyze metabolites in biopsied colorectal tumors and their matched normal mucosae obtained from 31 CRC patients. Orthogonal partial least …