Aberrant expression of miRNAs is associated with particular cancers showing tissue- and clinical-feature-specificity patterns. Some miRNA genes harboring or being embedded in CpG islands undergo methylation mediated silencing. MBP, methyl CpG binding protein, suppresses transcription through binding to methylated CpG dinucleotides. Expression of miR-373 has been reported to be suppressed in mal...

TrxG and PcG complexes play key roles in the epigenetic regulation of development through H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 modification at specific sites throughout the human genome, but how these sites are selected is poorly understood. We find that in pluripotent cells, clustered CpG-islands at genes predict occupancy of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3, and these "bivalent" chromatin domains precisely span the boun...

| An altered pattern of epigenetic modifications is central to many common human diseases, including cancer. Many studies have explored the mosaic patterns of DNA methylation and histone modification in cancer cells on a gene-by-gene basis; among their results has been the seminal finding of transcriptional silencing of tumour-suppressor genes by CpG-island-promoter hypermethylation. However, r...

The fish genus Xiphophorus provides a vertebrate model useful in etiological studies of cancer. Hybrid fish can spontaneously develop melanomas deriving from the inheritance of melanistic pigment patterns and the simultaneous absence of proper genetic regulation. A cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor gene, termed CDKN2X, was mapped to a genomic region that is implicated in fish melanoma tumor sup...

the p21 belongs to the cip/kip family of cdk inhibitors involved in cell cycle arrest at specific stages of the cell cycle progression. dna methylation is the best studied epigenetic mark that have been evidently associated to chromatin condensation, and repression of gene transcription. the cpg island hypermethylation in promoter region of certain genes occurs in cancer cells and affects tumor...

Directed differentiation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) into specific somatic cells holds great promise for cell replacement therapies. However, it is unclear if in vitro hESC differentiation causes any epigenetic abnormality such as hypermethylation of CpG islands. Using a differential methylation hybridization method, we identified 65 CpG islands (out of 4608 CpG islands or 1.4%) that ...

It is an exciting time for all those engaged in the treatment of colorectal cancer. The advent of new therapies presents the opportunity for a personalized approach to the patient. This approach considers the complex genetic mechanisms involved in tumorigenesis in addition to classical clinicopathological staging. The potential predictive and prognostic biomarkers which have stemmed from the st...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in the world. Fortunately, it is also proven to be one of the most preventable cancers, in large part due to the utilization of CRC screening. Historically, it was believed that the adenomatous polyp was the only precursor to carcinoma of the colorectum. Within the last decade, it has been shown that approximately 20-30% of sporadic colon ...

The concept of a CpG island methylator phenotype, or CIMP, quickly became the focus of several colorectal cancer studies describing its clinical and pathological features after its introduction in 1999 by Toyota and colleagues. Further characterization of CIMP in tumors lead to widespread acceptance of the concept, as expressed by Shen and Issa in their 2005 editorial, "CIMP, at last." Since th...