Editorial: NAR Cancer and epigenetics and cancer.

Over the past 20 years, breakthrough discoveries in epigenetics have transformed our knowledge of chromatin structure alterations and regulation mechanisms in response to physiological or pathological signals. Without changing the gene sequence, epigenetic changes affect the way our genes work, leading to heritable phenotypes. Cancer epigenetics is one of the most active areas of cancer research and represents the single largest category of article submissions to NAR Cancer . NAR Cancer is pleased to publish a thematic collection of articles, ‘Cancer Epigenetics’ that encapsulates exciting discoveries in this area. Ten Surveys and Summaries provide insights into the ways in which cancer progression, diagnosis and therapy are interwoven with epigenetics. These review articles, together with relevant recent standard articles, are now made available as a special collection on the journal’s website. This is the journal’s first-ever thematic collection. We plan for these collections to become regular features in the future. Chemical DNA and histones is the and other enzymes