Furthermore, we searched for the DEGs with altered epigenetics features (Table S2), and found that increased chromatin accessibility and/or decreased DNA methylation levels in promoter regions may explain the up-regulation of some normal_epi_colon highly expressed genes in cancer cells, such as CLDN3, CLDN4, TFF3 and MISP (Figs 1E and S1H; Table S2). Here, CLDN4 is linked to cancer.