ArticleNature communications2024
An improved epigenetic counter to track mitotic age in normal and precancerous tissues.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Epigenetic Markers of Cell Division and Ageing in Relation to Breast Cancer Survival.International journal of cancer · 2026Article
- Article
- The OmniAge compendium of aging omic biomarkers links mitotic clocks to clonal hematopoiesis and causality.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Epigenetic signatures of cardiometabolic risk in men: accelerated aging and differential methylation replicated across cohorts.Clinical epigenetics · 2026Article
- Longitudinal changes in DNA methylation in IDH-mutant glioma fuel disease progression through altered cell state differentiation.Nature genetics · 2026Article
- Impact of tobacco smoking on estimated telomere shortening and epigenetic age acceleration among human blood immune cell types.Clinical epigenetics · 2026Article
- Non-invasive epidermis sampling for DNA methylation-based prediction of skin cancer phenotypes.NPJ precision oncology · 2026Article
- Towards a personalized perspective on gliomas: an epigenetic-immuno-inflammatory aging framework.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Review
- Association of Epigenetic Aging Biomarkers With Risk of MASLD-Related HCC.Liver international : official journal of the International Association for the Study of the Liver · 2026Article
- Dynamic DNA methylation changes during colorectal oncogenesis with insights from adenoma stages.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Somatic Mutation Profiling and Therapeutic Landscape of Breast Cancer in the MENA Region.Cells · 2025Article
- Mapping the temporal landscape of breast cancer using epigenetic entropy.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Direct genetic transformation bypasses tumor-associated DNA methylation alterations.Genome biology · 2025Article
- EpInflammAge: Epigenetic-Inflammatory Clock for Disease-Associated Biological Aging Based on Deep Learning.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Epigenetic clocks and inflammaging: pitfalls caused by ignoring cell-type heterogeneity.GeroScience · 2025Article
- A Novel Framework for the Design of Minimized Epigenetic Clocks Using the Analysis of DNA Methylation Heterogeneity.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Epigenetic ageing clocks: statistical methods and emerging computational challenges.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Integrative genome-wide aberrant DNA methylation and transcriptome analysis identifies diagnostic markers for colorectal cancer.Archives of toxicology · 2025Article
- What makes biological age epigenetic clocks tick.Nature aging · 2025Article
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5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The cumulative number of stem cell divisions in a tissue, known as mitotic age, is thought to be a major determinant of cancer-risk. Somatic mutational and DNA methylation (DNAm) clocks are promising tools to molecularly track mitotic age, yet their relationship is underexplored and their potential for cancer risk prediction in normal tissues remains to be demonstrated. Here we build and validate an improved pan-tissue DNAm counter of total mitotic age called stemTOC. We demonstrate that stemTOC's mitotic age proxy increases with the tumor cell-of-origin fraction in each of 15 cancer-types, in precancerous lesions, and in normal tissues exposed to major cancer risk factors. Extensive benchmarking against 6 other mitotic counters shows that stemTOC compares favorably, specially in the preinvasive and normal-tissue contexts. By cross-correlating stemTOC to two clock-like somatic mutational signatures, we confirm the mitotic-like nature of only one of these. Our data points towards DNAm as a promising molecular substrate for detecting mitotic-age increases in normal tissues and precancerous lesions, and hence for developing cancer-risk prediction strategies.
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