Aberrant methylation of a CpG island in cancer is thought to silence a single gene but not its neighbors. A new study in colon cancer shows that transcriptional silencing can also be unexpectedly diffuse, encompassing all the genes over the 4 Mb of chromosome band 2q14.2, marked by archipelagos of methylated islands and uniform heterochromatin modification.
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Smith, J., Costello, J. A broad band of silence. Nat Genet 38, 504–506 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0506-504
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0506-504
