EPITRANS: A database that integrates epigenome and transcriptome data

Epigenetic modifications affect gene expression and thereby govern a wide range of biological processes such as differentiation, development and tumorigenesis. Recent initiatives to define genome-wide DNA methylation and histone modification profiles by microarray and sequencing methods have led to the construction of databases. These databases are repositories for international epigenetic consortiums or provide mining results from PubMed, but do not integrate the epigenetic information with gene expression changes. In order to overcome this limitation, we constructed EPITRANS, a novel database that visualizes the relationships between gene expression and epigenetic modifications. EPITRANS uses combined analysis of epigenetic modification and gene expression to search for cell function-related epigenetic and transcriptomic alterations (Freely available on the web at http://epitrans.org)This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government [Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning ( MSIP)] ( No. 2011-0001395 and 2011-0030775)