Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

By J. You, Peter A. Jones. Cancer Cell, 2012

1,101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Epigenetic and genetic alterations have long been thought of as two separate mechanisms participating in carcinogenesis. A recent outcome of whole exome sequencing of thousands of human cancers has been the unexpected discovery of many inactivating mutations in genes that control the epigenome. These mutations have the potential to disrupt DNA methylation patterns, histone modifications and nucleosome positioning and hence, gene expression. Genetic alteration of the epigenome therefore contributes to cancer just as epigenetic process can cause point mutations and disable DNA repair functions. This crosstalk between the genome and the epigenome offers new possibilities for therapy.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79bddbfc619de454ff952b39fad7909627a42825

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Citations in the corpus

Cancer epigenetics: Tumor Heterogeneity, Plasticity of Stem-like States, and Drug Resistance (2014, background): “Thus, very frequent mutations in the genes that encode for chromatin, nucleosome remodeling, and DNA methylation modifying proteins have been observed (Shen and Laird, 2013; You and Jones, 2012).”
Revisiting the hallmarks of cancer. (2017, positive): “We are also beginning to see beyond the genes through the appreciation of the significant role of epigenetics in the cancer process [17].”
Epigenetic Determinants of Cancer. (2016, background): “…frequent mutations in genes that encode for components of the epigenetic machinery, potentially resulting in abnormalities in the epigenome, which may affect gene expression patterns and genomic stability (Baylin and Jones 2011; You and Jones 2012; Garraway and Lander 2013; Shen and Laird 2013).”
Epigenetic plasticity and the hallmarks of cancer (2017, background): “A major, unanticipated outcome of large-scale cancer genome sequencing projects is the finding that roughly 50% of human cancers harbor mutations in chromatin proteins (7, 8).”
Selective Inhibition of Tumor Oncogenes by Disruption of Super-Enhancers (2013, background): “…targets for cancer because they are deregulated in numerous cancers (Baylin and Jones, 2011; Elsässer et al., 2011; Esteller, 2008; Feinberg and Tycko, 2004; You and Jones, 2012) and are amenable to small-molecule inhibition (Cole, 2008; Dawson and Kouzarides, 2012; Geutjes et al., 2012).”