Communications of the ACM
Chrogps, a New Generation Visual Browser of the Epigenome
The new, free ChroGPS software application facilitates the analysis and understanding of epigenetic data.
Credit: Institute for Research in Biomedicine
Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) researchers have developed ChroGPS, a software application that serves to facilitate the analysis and understanding of epigenetic data and to extract intelligible information, which can be downloaded for free.
"With ChroGPS we wanted to integrate epigenetic data with genetic data to reap the great benefits from them and to be able to understand this information," says IRB Barcelona professor Ferran Azorin.
This tool has produced the same results as those presented by researchers working on the modENCODE, but instead of seeing the information in hundreds of graphs and figures, the IRB Barcelona researchers have produced a single map.
"ChroGPS is based on the sequential application of two steps: first the generation of distances [or degrees of similarity] between epigenetic components on the basis of several possible measurements that we have developed, and after, in the representation of these distances in the form of bi- or tri-dimensional maps to facilitate their interpretation," says IRB Barcelona researcher Oscar Reina.
In the future, the researchers hope to follow the complex transformation of a healthy cell into a cancerous one by tracking the genetic and epigenetic changes that occur.
From IRB Barcelona
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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