Data from Histone-Related Genes Are Hypermethylated in Lung Cancer and Hypermethylated HIST1H4F Could Serve as a Pan-Cancer Biomarker
Year: 2023
Type: other
Abstract: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Cytologic examination is the current “gold standard” for lung cancer diagnosis, however, this has low sensitivity. Here, we identified a typical methylation signature of histone genes in lung cancer by whole-genome DNA methylation analysis, which was validated by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) lung cancer cohort (n = 907) and was further confirmed in 265 bronchoalveolar lavage fluid samples with specificity and sensitivity of 96.7% and 87.0%, respectively. More importantly, HIST1H4F was universally hypermethylated in all 17 tumor types from TCGA datasets (n = 7,344), which was further validated in nine different types of cancer (n = 243). These results demonstrate that HIST1H4F can function as a universal-cancer-only methylation (UCOM) marker, which may aid in understanding general tumorigenesis and improve screening for early cancer diagnosis. Significance: These findings identify a new biomarker for cancer detection and show that hypermethylation of histone-related genes seems to persist across cancers.
Authors: Shihua Dong, Wei Li, Lin Wang, Jie Hu, Yuanlin Song, Baolong Zhang, Xiaoguang Ren, Shimeng Ji, Jin Li, Peng Xu, Ying Liang, Gang Chen, Jia-Tao Lou, Wenqiang Yu
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4361845943