Previous studies of murine male germ cells with Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) revealed the expression of a large number of non-coding RNAs, including anti-sense transcripts, pseudogenes, long non-coding RNAs, and microRNAs in germ cells at different stages of spermatogenesis. Another study comparing the epigenome of normal testicular cells and testicular germ cell tumor (TGCT) cells using methylated DNA immunoprecipitation followed by whole genome methylated DNA tiling arrays (MeDIP-Chip) analysis, revealed a number of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) between normal and tumor cells. About 90% of these DMRs were mapped to intergenic regions in the human genome.
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