The pan-cancer analysis of DNA methylomes, published in 2018 (Saghafinia et al., 2018), reported that a proportion of IDH-wildtype gliomas exhibited high percentages of hypo-methylated loci, which correlated with a stemness signature (Malta et al., 2018), based on hypo-methylation of specific loci enriched for the SOX2-OCT4 binding motif. Here, POU5F1 is linked to central nervous system cancer.