Revealing the cancer epigenome computational analysis of biological networks

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed extensive developments in the area of biological instru- newlinementation and sequencing technologies. The advent of Next Generation Sequencing newline newline(NGS) techniques resulted in the piling up of specialized data in various biological newlinedatabases. Today, an unimaginably huge volume of information relevant for genomic newlinestudies is available in scientific literature and molecular databases, thanks to the newlineemergence of Bioinformatics as an interdisciplinary field of science. While this newlineinformation provides a goldmine for elucidating the mysteries of life, it also poses a newlinedaunting challenge of analyzing and interpreting these data. newlineEpigenetics has recently emerged as a new wave of research, which attempts newlineto study the mechanism of inheritance not involving changes in the DNA sequence. newlineEpigenetic events are characterized by methyl, acetyl, or histone modifications to the newlinechromosome. All these chemical tags taken together, constitute the epigenome. The newlineepigenome information is currently viewed as a means to improve clinical diagnosis newlineand precise molecular classification of diseases such as cancer in humans. Existing newlineepigenetic studies on pathways fail to consider the interactions between pathways, newlineand treat them simply as a functionally cohesive set of genes. Identifying epigenetic newlinepatterns that are conserved across cancer pathways is worth investigating, as it helps newlinein molecular classification of cancer. However, existing computational models try to newlinealign protein-protein interaction networks based on sequence similarity information, newlinewhich is of little use in epigenetic profiling, as the changes in epigenome are not newlinereflected in the DNA sequence. Computational methods to identify gene clusters, newlineintegrate multiple heterogeneous omic data types into a single scaffold network. newlineHowever, the exact relationship between gene expression and methylation has not newlinebeen elucidated clearly. newline