ECGene: A Literature-Based Knowledgebase of Endometrial Cancer Genes.

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Abstract

Endometrial cancer (EC) ranks as the sixth common cancer for women worldwide. To better distinguish cancer subtypes and identify effective early diagnostic biomarkers, we need improved understanding of the biological mechanisms associated with EC dysregulated genes. Although there is a wealth of clinical and molecular information relevant to EC in the literature, there has been no systematic summary of EC-implicated genes. In this study, we developed a literature-based database ECGene (Endometrial Cancer Gene database) with comprehensive annotations. ECGene features manual curation of 414 genes from thousands of publications, results from eight EC gene expression datasets, pre-computation of co-expressed long non-coding RNAs and an EC-implicated gene interactome. In the current release, we generated and comprehensively annotated a list of 458 EC-implicated genes. We found the top-ranked EC-implicated genes are frequently mutated in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) tumor samples. Furthermore, systematic analysis of co-expressed lncRNAs provided insight into the important roles of lncRNA in EC development. ECGene has a user-friendly web interface and is freely available at http://ecgene.bioinfo-minzhao.org/. As the first literature-based online resource for EC, ECGene serves as a useful gateway for researchers to explore EC genetics. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.