The placenta invades the adjacent uterus and controls the maternal immune system, like a cancer invades surrounding organs and suppresses the local immune response. Intriguingly, placental and cancer cells are globally hypomethylated and share an epigenetic phenomenon that is not well understood - they fail to silence repetitive DNA sequences (retrotransposons) that are silenced (methylated) in healthy somatic cells. In the placenta, hypomethylation of retrotransposons has facilitated the evolution of new genes essential for placental function. In cancer, hypomethylation is thought to contribute to activation of oncogenes, genomic instability, and retrotransposon unsilencing; the latter, we postulate, is possibly the most important consequence. Activation of placental retrotransposon-derived genes in cancer underpins our hypothesis that hypomethylation of these genes drives cancer cell invasion. This alludes to an interesting paradox, that while placental retrotransposon-derived genes are essential for promoting early hominid life, the same genes promote disease-susceptibility and death through cancer.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 March 2023.
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#17,386,130
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#181,199
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#24
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Altmetric has tracked 28,490,674 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 37th percentile – i.e., 37% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 47 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 44th percentile – i.e., 44% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
