Hongbo Liu¹ , Zhe Li² , Jing Ding³ , Jie Liu³ , Yan Zhang¹

1 College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China
2 College of Pharmacy, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China
3 The Second Affiliated Hospital, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150081, China
Author    Correspondence author
Computational Molecular Biology, 2013, Vol. 3, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/cmb.2013.03.0002
Received: 02 Aug., 2013    Accepted: 19 Aug., 2013    Published: 28 Oct., 2013

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Liu et al., 2013, Identification of the Bona fide Differentially Methylated Gene Markers among Cancers, Computational Molecular Biology, Vol.3, No.2 6-15 (doi: 10.5376/cmb.2013.03.0002)

DNA methylation plays important roles in the development of cancers. Previous studies have identified the differentially methylated sites (DMSs) between cancer and normal control. However, the methylation variations across multiple cancers have not been revealed. In this study, we identified DMSs among six human cancers (C-DMSs) and DMSs among five normal control tissues (T-DMSs). It is revealed that C-DMSs are highly overlapped with T-DMSs. By excluding the T-DMRs from C-DMRs, 4159 bona fide C-DMSs were selected as methylation variations across multiple cancers. Further analysis confirmed the roles of bona fide C-DMSs in regulation of cancer-related gene expression difference. Moreover, the genes related with these bona fide C-DMSs showed enrichment in the biological processes such as cell membrane components, cell adhesion, cell migration, immune response and cell proliferation, and also the pathways in cancer and bladder cancer. And twenty-eight genes are targeted by hsa-miR-323 which participates in tumorigenesis. In the end, we identified potential cancer-related genes by extracting protein interaction sub-network. This study provides a new framework for mining the potential cancer-specific methylation markers and oncogenes.

DNA methylation; Bona fide C-DMSs; Methylation variation; Ancer-specific methylation markers