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ABSTRACT
Abnormal DNA methylation is a fundamental characterization of epigenetics in cancer. Here we demonstrate that aberrant DNA methylating can modulate the tumour immune microenvironment in 16 cancer types. Differential DNA methylation in promoter region can regulate the transcriptomic pattern of immune-related genes and DNA hypomethylation mainly participated in the processes of immunity, carcinogenesis and immune infiltration. Moreover, many cancer types shared immune-related functions, like activation of innate immune response, interferon gamma response and NOD-like receptor signalling pathway. DNA methylation can further help identify molecular subtypes of kidney renal clear cell carcinoma. These subtypes are characterized by DNA methylation pattern, major histocompatibility complex, cytolytic activity and cytotoxic t lymphocyte and tumour mutation burden, and subtype with hypomethylation pattern shows unstable immune status. Then, we investigate the DNA methylation pattern of exhaustion-related marker genes and further demonstrate the role of hypomethylation in tumour immune microenvironment. In summary, our findings support the use of hypomethylation as a biomarker to understand the mechanism of tumour immune environment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data availability statement
The data are available from TCGA database (https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/).
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15592294.2023.2192894