The interplay between etiology-dependent genomic and epigenetic signatures: The paradigm of liver cancer

Abstract

Abstract The evolutionary theory assumes that occurrence of mutations in cancer is random. However, recent studies suggest that passenger mutations are not randomly scattered in cancer genomes and that chromatin organization dictate mutations profiles. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) serves as a model of diverse spectrum of cancers, since it is induced by a number of well-known etiological agents, mainly Hepatitis C virus (HCV) and Hepatitis B virus (HBV). This provides a unique opportunity to test whether different etiological agents dictate distinct mutational landscapes across the genome through a unique epigenetic signature. The HCC-specific genomic mutations were studied i..