A loss of TET enzymes, which demethylate DNA, may cause cancer. In TET deficient mice, DNA forms strange structures called G-quadruplexes (G4s) and R-loops that may drive cancer development, a December 22 study in Nature Immunology suggests.
The paper “is a great contribution to the field of G4/R-loop biology,” Giovanni Capranico, a molecular biologist at the University of Bologna who was not involved in the study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “The major advance is the strong and convincing evidence that TET gene deletions cause a B cell malignancy, at least in mice, [which is] associated with . . . G4s and R-loops,” he says. “Non-canonical nucleic acid structures were noticed to be increased in cancer cells already, but this paper has established a better-defined connection.”
Anjana Rao, a cellular and molecular biologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and her team first described the role of ...
