Histone methylation pattern in serous ovarian cancer. Homo sapiens

Global changes in the epigenetic landscape are a hallmark of cancer. Epigenetic has been known to play a pivotal role in regulating the malignant phenotype, but much is still unknown about its regular pattern in various tumors, including serous ovarian cancer (SOC, the most common type of ovarian cancer). To explore the epigenetic reprogramming of SOC, we performed genome-scale analysis of the methylation patterns at 6 sites of histones: tri-methylated Lys4 (H3K4me3), tri-methylated Lys36 (H3K36me3), Di- or tri-methylated Lys79 (H3K79me2/me3) on histone H3, correlated with active transcription; tri-methylated Lys9 (H3K9me3), tri-methylated Lys27 (H3K27me3) on histone H3 and tri-methylated Lys20 on histone H4 (H4K20me3), correlated with transcriptional repression. Meanwhile we also performed transcriptome sequencing analysis of the same samples.