Scientists have found that mice lacking one copy of a gene called CTCF have abnormal DNA methylation and are markedly predisposed to cancer, which can provide new hope for breast cancer.
According to the study, CTCF is a very well-studied DNA binding protein that exerts a major influence on the architecture of the human genome, but had not been previously linked to cancer.
Dr. Gala Filippova, staff scientist at Fred Hutch and co-author of the study, said that in the current study, they have explored whether loss of just one copy of the CTCF gene could trigger epigenetic changes and predispose to tumor development.
The study demonstrates that loss of one copy of CTCF caused large scale epigenetic changes and greatly enhanced tumor formation in multiple tissues and recent large scale analysis of the human cancer genome has also revealed that deletions or mutations in CTCF are one of the most common events in breast, endometrial, and other human cancers.
The study was published in Cell Reports.
