The highly ranked scientific journal BMC Bioinformatics has published our study of colorectal cancer, aiming to find early methylation biomarkers of this disease.

The aim of the work was to search for molecular biomarkers of early stages of colorectal cancer in the stool and blood of patients.

Using the Genome Enhancer tool we have developed, we analyzed a large collection of gene expression data (RNA-seq) and DNA methylation data for genomic CpG islands obtained from samples of tumors and normal intestinal epithelial tissues of 300 patients with colorectal cancer.

The biomarkers identified during the study underwent experimental testing on an independent set of blood samples from patients with colorectal cancer. As a result, using advanced statistics and machine learning techniques, a minimum set of 6 biomarkers has been selected that together provide the best potential for detecting cancer. Markers include hypermethylated positions in the regulatory regions of the following genes: CALCA, ENO1, MYC, PDX1, TCF7, ZNF43.

The full text of this publication is available at https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-019-2687-7