Multiomix: a cloud-based platform to infer cancer genomic and epigenomic events associated with gene expression modulation

MOTIVATION

Large-scale cancer genome projects have generated genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic and clinicopathological data from thousands of samples in almost every human tumor site. Although most omics data and their associated resources are publicly available, its full integration and interpretation to dissect the sources of gene expression modulation require specialized knowledge and software.

RESULTS

We present Multiomix, an interactive cloud-based platform that allows biologists to identify genetic and epigenetic events associated with the transcriptional modulation of cancer-related genes through the analysis of multi-omics data available on public functional genomic databases or user-uploaded datasets. Multiomix consists of an integrated set of functions, pipelines and a graphical user interface that allows retrieval, aggregation, analysis and visualization of different omics data sources. After the user provides the data to be analyzed, Multiomix identifies all significant correlations between mRNAs and non-mRNA genomics features (e.g. miRNA, DNA methylation and CNV) across the genome, the predicted sequence-based interactions (e.g. miRNA-mRNA) and their associated prognostic values.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

Multiomix is available at https://www.multiomix.org. The source code is freely available at https://github.com/omics-datascience/multiomix.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BioPlat: a software for human cancer biomarker discovery

SUMMARY

Development of effective tools such as oligo-microarrays and next-generation sequencing methods for monitoring gene expression on a large scale has resulted in the discovery of gene signatures with prognostic/predictive value in various malignant neoplastic diseases. However, with the exponential growth of gene expression databases, biologists are faced with the challenge of extracting useful information from these repositories. Here, we present a software package, BioPlat (Biomarkers Platform), which allows biologists to identify novel prognostic and predictive cancer biomarkers based on the data mining of gene expression signatures and gene expression profiling databases. BioPlat has been designed as an easy-to-use and flexible desktop software application, which provides a set of analytical tools related to data extraction, preprocessing, filtering, gene expression signature calculation, in silico validation, feature selection and annotation that leverage the integration and reuse of gene expression signatures in the context of follow-up data.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

BioPlat is a platform-independent software implemented in Java and supported on GNU/Linux and MS Windows, which is freely available for download at http://www.cancergenomics.net.