Colorectal cancer will once again be one of the most commonly diagnosed types of tumour in Spain this year.

According to the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM), 44,573 new cases will be detected in Spain this year. Worldwide, the incidence of this disease has doubled in the past 20 years, affecting more and more people under the age of 50. This trend is particularly worrying in some Western countries, where factors such as changes in diet and lifestyle, lack of exercise, alterations in the gut microbiome and exposure to certain adverse environmental factors may be playing a key role. 

What is causing the increase in cases among young people and how can we reduce these numbers? 

“Spanish girls want to be #ASTRONAUTS. It’s not a dream; it’s a reality” posted Sara García Alonso after the publication of the Annual Adecco Survey, which asked over 1,100 children about what they dreamed of doing as a job.

Sara, a molecular biologist at Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and the country’s first candidate to become an astronaut for the European Space Agency, has managed to make travelling into space seem possible and has fired the imagination of young girls. Because when a woman is visible, when she forges a path, many more girls can see themselves in her place. 

That’s why today, to commemorate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science,

The body’s cells divide around 10 quadrillion times in a lifetime. This carefully regulated process enables an original cell to replicate itself, giving rise to two daughter cells, each with a precise copy of the cell’s DNA.

Microtubules play a critical role in allocating the chromosomes to the two daughter cells. Microtubules make up the cytoskeleton, the “scaffolding” that grows and shrinks to support the cell’s architecture and coordinate its movements, and tubulins are the proteins responsible for forming these microtubules and for how they act.

More than 40 years ago, researchers described what is today known as the “tubulin code”: the diversity of structural variants and chemical modifications undergone by these proteins,