Researchers funded by NCI’s Division of Cancer Biology created a computational tool, called “MethNet,” that can help you better understand the impact of noncoding elements on gene expression. Using MethNet, you can gain deeper insight into cis-regulatory elements (CREs)—those hubs of noncoding elements that help promote, enhance, silence, and otherwise regulate gene expression.

Senior author, Dr. Jane Skok, of New York University, said, “In designing our study, our motivation was to uncover interactions common across multiple cancers, rather than looking only at cancer-specific CRE-gene interactions. We call these multi-cancer CREs hubs.”

She added, “Using MethNet we were able to identify a core, robust set of dynamic associations occurring across tissues that we could link to regulatory mechanisms underlying gene expression in cancer.”

Co-corresponding author, Dr. Aristotelis Tsirigos, also of New York University, said, “MethNet also let us prioritize candidate non-coding driver mutations, giving us insight into genes that could be targeted for future therapeutics.”

He added, “MethNet scales with data, so for our next steps we’ll be looking into using this tool with larger data sets and including other multimodal data.”