Normal adult tissue stem cells awake from a dormant state to grow, differentiate, and regenerate damaged tissue. They also travel in the circulation and colonize distant organs at sites undergoing tissue repair. These same traits are utilized or co-opted by metastatic cancer cells. The cancer stem cell theory proposes that tumors emerge from a subpopulation of cancer cells that possess stem cel...

Enhancers are short regulatory regions (50-1500 bp) of DNA that control the tissue-specific activation of gene expression by long distance interaction with targeting gene regions. Recently, genome-wide identification of enhancers in diverse tissues and cell lines was achieved using high-throughput sequencing. Enhancers have been associated with malfunctions in cancer development resulting from ...