Cancer genes hypermethylated in human embryonic stem cells Calvanese, Vicenzo Horrillo, Angelica Hmadcha, Abdelkrim Suárez-Álvarez, Beatriz Fernández, Agustín F. Lara, Ester Casado, Sara Menéndez, Pablo Bueno, Clara García-Castro, Javier Rubio, Ruth Lapunzina, Pablo Alaminos Mingorance, Miguel Borghese, Lodovica Terstegge, Stefanie Harrison, Neil J. Moore, Harry D. Brüstle, Oliver López Larrea, Carlos Andrews, Peter W. Soria, Bernat Esteller, Manel Fraga, Mario F. Cell differentiation DNA Embryonic stem cells Lymphocytes Neutrophils Stem cells Developmental genes are silenced in embryonic stem cells by a bivalent histone-based chromatin mark. It has been proposed that this mark also confers a predisposition to aberrant DNA promoter hypermethylation of tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) in cancer. We report here that silencing of a significant proportion of these TSGs in human embryonic and adult stem cells is associated with promoter DNA hypermethylation. Our results indicate a role for DNA methylation in the control of gene expression in human stem cells and suggest that, for genes repressed by promoter hypermethylation in stem cells in vivo, the aberrant process in cancer could be understood as a defect in establishing an unmethylated promoter during differentiation, rather than as an anomalous process of de novo hypermethylation. 2014-03-11T12:27:39Z 2014-03-11T12:27:39Z 2008 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Calvanese, V.; et al. Cancer genes hypermethylated in human embryonic stem cells. Plos One, 3(9): e3294 (2008). [http://hdl.handle.net/10481/30782] 1932-6203 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003294 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/30782 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Public Library of Science (PLOS)