Welcome to CR2Cancer

Chromatin Regulators (CRs) can dynamically modulate chromatin architecture to epigenetically regulate gene expression in response to intrinsic and extrinsic signalling cues. It mainly refers to three categories of epigenetic mechanisms: DNA methylation, histone modifications and nucleosome placement. The interplay of these marks constitutes an epigenomic landscape, which could be recognized, established and maintained by CRs in a cell context-dependent fashion. Somatic alterations or dysregulation of CRs could destroy local or global epigenetic patterns, leading to a wide range of diseases, notably cancer. In addition, due to the reversible nature of epigenetic modifications, a number of small molecules that inhibit the activity of aberrant CRs have been in clinical use or trial for cancer therapy.

CR2Cancer is a comprehensive annotation and visualization database for CRs in human cancer constructed by high throughput data analysis (e.g. TCGA and CCLE) and literature mining (PubMed). It contains:

  • Genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, clinical and functional information for over 400 CRs across multiple cancer types.

  • Diverse types of CR-associated relations, including cancer type dependent (CR-target and miRNA-CR) and independent (protein-protein interaction and drug-target) ones.

  • About 6000 items of aberrant molecular change (mutation or dysregulation) and interactions of CRs in cancer development manually curated from 5007 publications.

CR2Cancer provides a user-friendly interface to browse, search and download data of interest. We believe that this database would become a valuable resource for cancer epigenetics research and therapy.


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Citation: Beibei Ru, Jianlong Sun, Yin Tong, Ching Ngar Wong, Aditi Chandra, Acacia Tsz So Tang, Larry Ka Yue Chow, Wai Lam Wun, Zarina Levitskaya, Jiangwen Zhang. CR2Cancer: a database for chromatin regulators in human cancer. Nucleic Acids Research. 2018; 46(D1):D918-D924. [ Full Text ]