CR2Cancer: a database for chromatin regulators in human cancer

Abstract Chromatin regulators (CRs) can dynamically modulate chromatin architecture to epigenetically regulate gene expression in response to intrinsic and extrinsic signalling cues. Somatic alterations or misexpression of CRs might reprogram the epigenomic landscape of chromatin, which in turn lead to a wide range of common diseases, notably cancer. Here, we present CR2Cancer, a comprehensive annotation and visualization database for CRs in human cancer constructed by high throughput data analysis and literature mining. We collected and integrated genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, clinical and functional information for over 400 CRs across multiple cancer types. We also built diverse types of CR-associated relations, including cancer type dependent (CR-target and miRNA-CR) and independent (protein-protein interaction and drug-target) ones. Furthermore, we manually curated around 6000 items of aberrant molecular alterations and interactions of CRs in cancer development from 5007 publications. CR2Cancer provides a user-friendly web interface to conveniently browse, search and download data of interest. We believe that this database would become a valuable resource for cancer epigenetics investigation and potential clinical application. CR2Cancer is freely available at http://cis.hku.hk/CR2Cancer.