Pluto Bioinformatics

GSE119103: Corrupted coordination of epigenetic modifications leads to diverging chromatin states and transcriptional heterogeneity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Bulk RNA sequencing

Cancer evolution is fueled by genetic and epigenetic diversity, and intra-tumoral heterogeneity in DNA methylation has been shown to co-operate with genetic heterogeneity to empower evolutionary capacity of cancers such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Here, we show that epigenetic diversification leads to decreased coordination across layers of epigenetic information, likely reflecting an admixture of cells with diverging epigenetic identities. This manifests in incomplete gene silencing by the Polycomb complex, unexpected co-occurrence of typically mutually exclusive activating and repressing histone modifications, and greater cell-to-cell transcriptional heterogeneity. SOURCE: Omar Abdel-Wahab (abdelwao@mskcc.org) - Abdel-Wahab MSKCC