Identification of a novel methylated gene in nasopharyngeal carcinoma: TTC40.

To further explore the epigenetic changes in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), methylation-sensitive arbitrarily primed PCR was performed on NPC biopsies and nontumor nasopharyngeal samples. We have shown mainly two DNA fragments that appeared to be differentially methylated in NPCs versus nontumors. The first, defined as hypermethylated, corresponds to a CpG island at the 5'-end of the tetratricopeptide repeat domain 40 (TTC40) gene, whereas the second, defined as hypo-methylated, is located on repetitive sequences at chromosomes 16p11.