Symptoms of colon cancer may include a change in bowel activity or blood in the feces. Such blood is often invisible to the human eye, but can be detected through laboratory testing. Treatment for colon cancer is heavily dependent on the stage of the disease. Early stage tumors can often be removed with excision, and in some cases the cancer requires the removal of a significant portion of the colon. A colostomy may be necessary in such cases to provide an alternative route for waste removal from the body. Advanced colon cancers are often treated with chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or biological therapy in addition to surgical techniques.

The rat colon tissue section illustrated in the digital image above was labeled with wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) conjugated to Texas Red. WGA, which selectively binds to N-acetylglucosamine and N-acetylneuraminic (sialic acid) residues, is well suited for staining the Golgi network in fixed cells and tissues since a number of proteins and lipids found in the Golgi apparatus are glycosylated. The specimen was also labeled with Alexa Fluor 488 conjugated to phalloidin (targeting F-actin) and Hoechst 33342 (targeting DNA in the nucleus). Images were recorded in grayscale with a 12-bit digital camera coupled to a Nikon Eclipse 80i microscope equipped with bandpass emission fluorescence filter optical blocks. During the processing stage, individual image channels were pseudocolored with RGB values corresponding to each of the fluorophore emission spectral profiles.