Epigenomic usually refers to processes occuring outside of the primary (ATGC) sequence. DNA methylation and histone modification are good examples of epigenomic processes. If you were to look at the DNA sequence, it would look the same but the addition of methyl groups to regulatory regions (eg CpG islands) can activate or silence genes. There is currently an effort to catalog all of the epigenomic changes in the genome which has been dubbed the 'epigenome' kind of like 'proteome' or 'transcriptome'.
I haven't read the journal article in Cell yet, but from my understanding this isn't interesting from the standpoint of a virus being able to transform normal cells into a tumor. There are a large number of examples of that (EBV, KSHV, hepatitis B virus). This is interesting because it's the actual tumor cells themselves that are being transmitted from one host to another. You can do that in the lab by injecting tumor cells from one mouse into another and letting a new tumor form, however I haven't seen examples of this occuring naturally and in those experiments the mice need to either be from the same genetic background or immunosuppressed SCID mice.
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Epigenomic usually refers to processes occuring outside of the primary (ATGC) sequence. DNA methylation and histone modification are good examples of epigenomic processes. If you were to look at the DNA sequence, it would look the same but the addition of methyl groups to regulatory regions (eg CpG islands) can activate or silence genes. There is currently an effort to catalog all of the epigenomic changes in the genome which has been dubbed the 'epigenome' kind of like 'proteome' or 'transcriptome'.
I haven't read the journal article in Cell yet, but from my understanding this isn't interesting from the standpoint of a virus being able to transform normal cells into a tumor. There are a large number of examples of that (EBV, KSHV, hepatitis B virus). This is interesting because it's the actual tumor cells themselves that are being transmitted from one host to another. You can do that in the lab by injecting tumor cells from one mouse into another and letting a new tumor form, however I haven't seen examples of this occuring naturally and in those experiments the mice need to either be from the same genetic background or immunosuppressed SCID mice.