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. 2021 Aug 7;28:58. doi: 10.1186/s12929-021-00754-2

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 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 in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — Global DNA hypomethylation leads to TE reactivation in cancer cells. In somatic cells, TEs are mostly silenced by epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation. However, a detectable portion of transcripts expressed from normal somatic cells (blue cells in the left panel) are still characterized as TE-containing transcripts with potential physiological functions. In cancer cells (right panel), global hypomethylation is observed, including removal of the repressive marks on TEs. Consequently, increased levels of long/small RNA products from TE-containing regions are observed. Excessive sense or antisense TE transcripts might cause the targeted degradation of TE-containing mRNAs based on reverse complementarity. In addition, TE transcripts may cause alternative splicing, gene mutation and genomic instability, including DNA DSBs and chromosomal rearrangement via somatic retrotransposition. Modified from [9]