ABOVE: An artist’s rendering of the inside of a nucleus
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Most cancer cells have genomes that are much less methylated than those of normal cells, but whether this loss of methylation, an epigenetic process, has any functional meaning for the cells has long been an unanswered question. Now researchers show that the loss of DNA methylation across the genome changes the timing of DNA replication and alters the shape of the 3-D compartmentalization of DNA, which helps steer gene expression.
The study, published September 21 in Cell Reports, is “an elegant dissection of the impact of DNA methylation on 3-D genome organization,” says Emma Bell, a bioinformatician at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto who did not participate in the work. “It’s really important to show how extensively aberrant DNA methylation, which is a common artifact of cancer, impacts higher order genome organization and DNA replication.”
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