Scenario Of Epigenetic Alterations And Gastric Cancer-A Review

Review Article
Nissar Ahmad Naikoo., Showkat Ahmad Bhat., Sabhiya Majid., Hilal Ahmad Wani., Roohi Ashraf., Rafiqa Eachkoti., Tehseen Hassan and Akbar Masood
DOI: 
http://dx.doi.org/10.24327/ijrsr.2018.0905.2103
Subject: 
science
KeyWords: 
Epigenetic alterations, Gastric Cancer, Methylation, Histone modifications.
Abstract: 

Gastric cancer is believed to be result of the accumulation of multiple genetic alterations resulting in either oncogenic over expression or loss of tumor suppressor gene function. Epigenetic alterations as a crucial mechanism to silence the variety of methylated tissue-specific and imprinted genes have been extensively studied in gastric carcinoma and have been found to play important roles in gastric carcinogenesis and as a result epigenetics has become a hot topic for research, whereby genetic markers are bypassed and research on reversible epigenetic events, such as methylation and histone modifications that play a crucial role in carcinogenesis is need of the day. Epigenetic alterations, including DNA methylation, histone modification, loss of genome imprinting, chromatin remodeling and non-coding RNAs, have been found to be associated with human carcinogenesis. Detection of epigenetic changes has been applied in the clinics to stratify risk in cancer development, detect early cancer and predict clinical outcomes as epigenetic changes including altered DNA methylation are reversible and are used as targets for cancer therapy or chemoprevention. As per literature a number of recent studies reported DNA methylation level to be a useful biomarker for diagnosis, risk assessment and prognosis prediction for gastrointestinal (GI) cancers. This review briefly discusses the basic aspects of epigenetics