BioC2024

Plasticity is a cell's ability to rapidly and reversibly alter its phenotype, typically without significant epigenetic remodeling. While plasticity is known to play an important role in many human systems, such as colon crypt maintenance, it may also help to explain how a single progenitor cell can give rise to a tumor with many different cellular phenotypes. We found evidence of phenotypic plasticity by examining DNA methylation profiles and single-cell RNA-Seq data from both normal colon crypts and colorectal cancers. Specifically, we found that genes with higher expression variability tended to have more conserved, or less variable, methylation profiles. However, many existing quantitative methods for the analysis of multi-omic data are designed to identify correlation or covariance between epigenetic features and gene expression. Such methods may not be well-calibrated to detect phenotypic plasticity, in which conservation, not variability, of the epigenome plays an important role.