A Breath of Fresh Air: Opening up the Lung Cancer Genome

In this issue of Cancer Research, Wang and colleagues identify a large number of regulatory sites within the genomes of non-small cell lung cancers with a global scan for open chromatin (assaying for transposase-accessible chromatin with sequencing). They show that this type of profiling might substitute RNA sequencing in classifying lung cancer samples and in making predictions about prognosis. They also show experimentally that genome editing of some regulatory sites upregulates the expression of GSTM1 and GSTT1, which are required for detoxification of carcinogens and whose low expression levels are associated with lung cancer risk.See related article by Wang et al., p. 4840.