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Motivation: The understanding of cancer mechanism requires the identification of genes playing a role in the development of the pathology and the characterization of their role (notably oncogenes and tumor suppressors). Results: We present an R/bioconductor package called MoonlightR which returns a list of candidate driver genes for specific cancer types on the basis of TCGA expression data. The method first infers gene regulatory networks and then carries out a functional enrichment analysis (FEA) (implementing an upstream regulator analysis, URA) to score the importance of well-known biological processes with respect to the studied cancer type. Eventually, by means of random forests, MoonlightR predicts two specific roles for the candidate driver genes: i) tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) and ii) oncogenes (OCGs). As a consequence, this methodology does not only identify genes playing a dual role (e.g. TSG in one cancer type and OCG in another) but also helps in elucidating the biological processes underlying their specific roles. In particular, MoonlightR can be used to discover OCGs and TSGs in the same cancer type. This may help in answering the question whether some genes change role between early stages (I, II) and late stages (III, IV) in breast cancer. In the future, this analysis could be useful to determine the causes of different resistances to chemotherapeutic treatments.

The aim of TCGAbiolinks is : i) facilitate the GDC open-access data retrieval, ii) prepare the data using the appropriate pre-processing strategies, iii) provide the means to carry out different standard analyses and iv) to easily reproduce earlier research results. In more detail, the package provides multiple methods for analysis (e.g., differential expression analysis, identifying differentially methylated regions) and methods for visualization (e.g., survival plots, volcano plots, starburst plots) in order to easily develop complete analysis pipelines.

DNA methylation is generally considered to be associated with transcriptional silencing. However, comprehensive, genome-wide investigation of this relationship requires the evaluation of potentially millions of correlation values between the methylation of individual genomic loci and expression of associated transcripts in a relatively large numbers of samples. Methodical makes this process quick and easy while keeping a low memory footprint. It also provides a novel method for identifying regions where a number of methylation sites are consistently strongly associated with transcriptional expression. In addition, Methodical enables housing DNA methylation data from diverse sources (e.g. WGBS, RRBS and methylation arrays) with a common framework, lifting over DNA methylation data between different genome builds and creating base-resolution plots of the association between DNA methylation and transcriptional activity at transcriptional start sites.