Cancer Biology Commons^™

Identifying Regulators From Multiple Types Of Biological Data In Cancer, Brittany Baur

Dissertations (1934 -)

Cancer genomes accumulate alterations that promote cancer cell proliferation and survival. Structural, genetic and epigenetic alterations that have a selective advantage for tumorigenesis affect key regulatory genes and microRNAs that in turn regulate the expression of many target genes. The goal of this dissertation is to leverage the alteration-rich landscape of cancer genomes to detect key regulatory genes and microRNAs. To this end, we designed a feature selection algorithm to identify DNA methylation signals around a gene that would highly predict its expression. We found that genes whose expression could be predicted by DNA methylation accurately were enriched in Gene …