MeInfoText: Associated gene methylation and cancer information from text mining

Abstract

Background: DNA methylation is an important epigenetic modification of the genome. Abnormal DNA methylation may result in silencing of tumor suppressor genes and is common in a variety of human cancer cells. As more epigenetics research is published electronically, it is desirable to extract relevant information from biological literature. To facilitate epigenetics research, we have developed a database called MeInfoText to provide gene methylation information from text mining. Description: MeInfoText presents comprehensive association information about gene methylation and cancer, the profile of gene methylation among human cancer types and the gene methylation profile of a specific cancer type, based on association mining from large amounts of literature. In addition, MeInfoText offers integrated protein-protein interaction and biological pathway information collected from the Internet. MeInfoText also provides pathway cluster information regarding to a set of genes which may contribute the development of cancer due to aberrant methylation. The extracted evidence with highlighted keywords and the gene names identified from each methylation-related abstract is also retrieved. The database is now available at http://mit.lifescience.ntu.edu.tw/. Conclusion: MeInfoText is a unique database that provides comprehensive gene methylation and cancer association information. It will complement existing DNA methylation information and will be useful in epigenetics research and the prevention of cancer. © 2008 Fang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.