In addition, it has been reported that DNMT3a can regulate the expression of apoptosis-related genes in cancer cells through changing the methylation levels at the promoter regions of the apoptosis-related genes, such as Bad, Bax and Bcl2 (Jing et al., 2019; Li et al., 2019a; Wei et al., 2019). The gene discussed is BAX; the disease is cancer.