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An area gaining attention in cancer research is epigenetics — loosely defined as the study of heritable changes in phenotype or gene expression resulting from causes other than DNA-sequence changes. Histones, the core proteins around which the DNA spool is wound, are implicated in gene regulation, but how histone variants promote melanoma formation was not evident until now.
Investigators found that levels of the histone variants mH2A1 and mH2A2 were significantly decreased in metastatic cell lines (murine and human) and that mH2A2 was abundant in melanocytes of benign nevi and radial-growth-phase lesions but absent in more than 80% of vertical-growth-phase and metastatic melanomas. They also found that targeted suppression of mH2A2 in a mel…