CRC-EBD: Epigenetic Biomarker Database for Colorectal Cancer

CRC-EBD (Epigenetic Biomarker Database for ColoRectal Cancer) is a database of epigenetic biomarkers for CRC.

Epigenetics is “the study of heritable phenotype changes that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence”. Epigenetic modification has many types of modification, such as DNA methylation, histone modification, and genomic imprinting. DNA methylation is one of the best characterized epigenetic mechanism.DNA methylation is a process that the DNA molecule is added by methyl groups which is often happened on CpG (5'—C—phosphate—G—3').

We used text mining and manually read to get data from PubMed. Now the database contains 355 epigenetic biomarkers from 241 published papers (until Dec, 2019).

The differences between CRC-EBD and other databases mainly include:
1) The biomarker names in CRC-EBD were normalized as the similar format. The cancer names in CRC-EBD were unified as colorectal cancer, colon cancer, rectal cancer.
2) All the gene symbols were annoated as the official gene symbols and added links to NCBI gene. All the miRNAs were annoated as the miRNA name from miRbase.
3) Our data was manually checked with significant results.