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Silently tucked away in our genomes, some of these bits of foreign DNA can get passed down through the generations. They were long thought inactive, but we've since learned these stowaway sequences can be turned back on to wreak all sorts of havoc.
"Our study shows that diseases today can be significantly influenced by these ancient viral infections that until recently very few researchers were paying attention to,"cells express a lot of genes that are not supposed to be on, but no one really knows what is turning them on,"Ivancevic and her team analysed published datasets on the epigenomes of 21 different types of cancer and were surprised to find that a particular family of ERV called long terminal repeat 10 was active at...
When the undead LTR10 genes were snipped out of action in human colorectal tumor cells and in mice, genes that cause cancer to grow, including XRCC4, known to be involved in therapy resistance, were also deactivated. This allowed treatments that shrink the tumors in mice to work better.Cancers seem to be using these discarded virus parts to change patterns of gene expression across tumors, with just one family of retroviruses regulating up to a staggering 70 cancer-associated genes.
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