Figure 3.

Constitutional epimutations and epigenetic mosaicism as a mechanism of cancer causality and targets for biomarker discovery. Although epigenetic patterns are tissue specific, interrogating the epigenome in tissues that are not the target tissue (surrogates) may be informative of exposure history and cancer risk. Environmental exposure, stochastic event, or even germline epimutation may be propagated over life course and result in epigenetic mosaicism or germline epimutations across tissues which may constitute an increased susceptibility to cancer.