Effect of radiofrequency on DNAm of repetitive elements in human cell lines
A large body of evidence indicates that environmental agents can induce alterations in DNA methylation (DNAm) profiles. Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs) are radiations emitted by everyday devices which have been classified as possibly carcinogenic, however their biological effects are unclear. As aberrant DNAm of genomic repetitive elements (RE) may promote genomic instability, here we sought to determine whether exposure to RFEMFs could affect DNAm of different classes of RE, such as long interspersed nuclear element1s (LINE-1), Alu short interspersed nuclear element and ribosomal repeats. To this purpose, we analyzed DNAm profiles of neuroblastoma and cervical cancer cell lines (HeLa, BE(2)C and SH-SY5Y) exposed to 900 MHz GSM-modulated RF-EMF through an Illumina-based targeted deep bisulfite sequencing approach.