Fig. 2

Potential contributions of hypomethylated REs to carcinogenesis. As opposed to normal cells, cancer cells are characterized by cytosine methylation loss at repetitive DNA. This alteration can affect cell behaviour and contribute to cancer initiation/progression in several ways. The hypomethylated REs can be regulators of oncogenic lncRNAs and, thus, induce their abnormal transcription. TEs or satellite DNA, once hypomethylated, can be also transcribed potentially affecting several processes and leading to genomic and chromosome stability. Furthermore, hypomethylation of REs could affect chromosome structure making it more fragile and prone to breaks, recombination and even to the weakening of centromere function. By changing the compaction degree of the chromatin, hypomethylation of REs also affects nucleus size and organization which, we believe, could dangerously compromise cells, though this research field has not been well explored