This book is the proceedings of Falk Symposium 128, held in Wurzburg, Germany, on May 2-3, 2002, and dedicated to the important issue of colonic carcinogenesis and its underlying genetic and environmental factors.

Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death in industrialized countries. It has been recognized to be the consequence of a dynamic process leading from hyperproliferative epithelium through different classes of adenomas to invasive carcinoma. This adenoma-carcinoma sequence has been characterized on a molecular basis. Modern molecular biology has...