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. 2014 Oct 6;15(1):868. doi: 10.1186/1471-2164-15-868

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© Zhang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Proposed model for loss of tissue identity during carcinogenesis associated with epigenetic alterations at enhancers. Left: Normal DNA methylation at enhancers mediates tissue-specific gene silencing and activation in normal cells. Right: DNA methylation alteration at enhancers in cancer cells induces abnormal regulation and subsequent changes in expression of tissue-specifically silenced or activated genes, leading to loss of tissue identity.