DNA methylation data of tumor and non-tumor liver tissues from Peruvian patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)

A large fraction of HCC in Peru arises in younger, non-cirrhotic patients. Global DNA methylation analysis of the HCC and non-tumor liver (NTL) tissues demostrate a profound overhaul of the developmental DNA methylation programme culminating in an global hyper-methylated pattern in HCC. We used microarrays to compare global DNA methylation between tumor and non-tumor liver tissues and identified CpGs and ontologies that are distinctively differentially methylated between subsets. HCC patients were treated by anatomic liver resection. Non-tumor liver tissues were obtained from tumor-free margins of resected surgical pieces. Total DNA was isolated from flash-frozen samples for hybridization on Illumina microarrays.