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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jan 21, 2016; 22(3): 1190-1201
Published online Jan 21, 2016. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v22.i3.1190
Genomic and epigenomic heterogeneity in molecular subtypes of gastric cancer
Byungho Lim, Jong-Hwan Kim, Mirang Kim, Seon-Young Kim
Byungho Lim, Jong-Hwan Kim, Seon-Young Kim, Genome Structure Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon 305-806, South Korea
Jong-Hwan Kim, Mirang Kim, Seon-Young Kim, Department of Functional Genomics, University of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-350, South Korea
Mirang Kim, Epigenome Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon 305-806, South Korea
Author contributions: Lim B, Kim M and Kim SY contributed to manuscript drafting and data analysis; Kim JH contributed to data analysis; Kim SY and Kim M contributed equally and should be considered co-corresponding authors.
Supported by Grants from the genomics program of the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, NRF-2012M3A9D1054670 and NRF-2014M3C9A3068554 (to Kim SY); and Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, NRF-2013R1A1A2006621 (to Kim M); and the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology research initiative grant.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Authors declare no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Seon-Young Kim, PhD, Genome Structure Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon 305-806, South Korea. kimsy@kribb.re.kr
Telephone: +82-42-8798116 Fax: +82-42-8798119
Received: April 21, 2015
Peer-review started: April 22, 2015
First decision: August 26, 2015
Revised: September 8, 2015
Accepted: October 12, 2015
Article in press: October 13, 2015
Published online: January 21, 2016
Processing time: 269 Days and 1.5 Hours
Abstract

Gastric cancer is a complex disease that is affected by multiple genetic and environmental factors. For the precise diagnosis and effective treatment of gastric cancer, the heterogeneity of the disease must be simplified; one way to achieve this is by dividing the disease into subgroups. Toward this effort, recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technology have revealed four molecular subtypes of gastric cancer, which are classified as Epstein-Barr virus-positive, microsatellite instability, genomically stable, and chromosomal instability subtypes. We anticipate that this molecular subtyping will help to extend our knowledge for basic research purposes and will be valuable for clinical use. Here, we review the genomic and epigenomic heterogeneity of the four molecular subtypes of gastric cancer. We also describe a mutational meta-analysis and a reanalysis of DNA methylation that were performed using previously reported gastric cancer datasets.

Keywords: DNA methylation; Gastric cancer; Molecular subtype; Mutation; Next-generation sequencing

Core tip: For the effective diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer, a recent sequencing study classified gastric cancer into four molecular subtypes, which include Epstein-Barr virus-positive, microsatellite instability, genomically stable, and chromosomal instability subtypes. This molecular subtyping will extend our knowledge for basic research and will be valuable for clinical uses. We herein discuss the genomic and epigenomic heterogeneity of the four molecular subtypes of gastric cancer. We also describe a meta-analysis result that was performed using previously reported sequencing datasets.