RESEARCH ARTICLE A systematic approach ide

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is an important mechanism for cancer metastasis [1], the cause of 90 % of deaths from solid tumors [2]. During EMT, epithelial cells lose epithelial characteristics and gain a mesenchymal morphological phenotype with the accompanying migration and invasion characteristics [3]. Since invasion of tumor cells into the bloodstream is the first step of metastasis, EMT enables the tumor cells to migrate and invade [1]. EMT is induced by expression of transcription factors (TFs), such as SNAIL [4,5], SLUG [5], ZEB1 [6,7], ZEB2 [8], E47 [5,9], TWIST1 [10], FOXC2 [11] and Goosecoid [12]. These TFs suppress critical epithelial cell traits, permitting the transformation to mesenchymal cells to occur. In cancer, overexpression of TFs promotes EM