Opening chromatin: long-term detriment?

An Institute for Research in Biomedicine team has shown increasing chromatin accessibility in cancer could promote tumor aggressiveness, not reduce tumor mutation burden (TMB) as previously thought. The findings, reported last month in Nature Cell Biology, underscore the need to evaluate the long-term effects of chromatin modifiers in tumor models before taking them into the clinic.

Epigenetic modifiers that can reduce chromatin accessibility, and whose inhibitors can increase it, include histone deacetylases (HDACs), euchromatic histone-lysine N-methyltransferase 2 (EHMT2; G9A), enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) and lysine-specific demethylase 1 (LSD1; KDM1A). ...