NCBI Epigenomics: a new public resource for exploring epigenomic data sets

The Epigenomics database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a new resource that has been created to serve as a comprehensive public resource for whole-genome epigenetic data sets (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ epigenomics). Epigenetics is the study of stable and heritable changes in gene expression that occur independently of the primary DNA sequence. Epigenetic mechanisms include post-translational modifications of histones, DNA methylation, chromatin conformation and non-coding RNAs. It has been observed that misregulation of epigenetic processes has been associated with human disease. We have constructed the new resource by selecting the subset of epigenetics-specific data from general-purpose archives, such as the Gene Expression Omnibus, and Sequence Read Archives, and then subjecting them to further review, annotation and reorganization. Raw data is processed and mapped to genomic coordinates to generate ‘tracks’ that are a visual representation of the da...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: NAR
• Authors: Ian M. Fingerman, Lee McDaniel, Xuan Zhang, Walter Ratzat, Tarek Hassan, Zhifang Jiang, Robert F. Cohen, Gregory D. Schuler
• Keywords: Biological Attributes, Epigenetic Mechanisms, Genome Browsers, NAR 2011