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.