ESR1 and breast cancer: Interestingly, DNA methylation at several sites within the HOXC locus negatively correlates with the expression of this miRNA, supporting the notion of DNA methylation as a repressive epigenetic modification in this context.67 We demonstrated that several transcription factors that bind to these differentially methylated regions strongly associate with MIR196A expression in breast cancer, even in those tumours with show a negative correlation to ERα expression.