Enrichment analysis with EpiAnnotator

Abstract

Motivation Deciphering relevant biological insights from epigenomic data can be a challenging task. One commonly used approach is to perform enrichment analysis. However, finding, downloading and using the publicly available functional annotations require time, programming skills and IT infrastructure. Here we describe the online tool EpiAnnotator for performing enrichment analyses on epigenomic data in a fast and user-friendly way. Results EpiAnnotator is an R Package accompanied by a web interface. It contains regularly updated annotations from 4 public databases: Blueprint, RoadMap, GENCODE and the UCSC Genome Browser. Annotations are hosted locally or in a server environment and automatically updated by scripts of our own design. Thousands of tracks are available, reflecting data on a variety of tissues, cell types and cell lines from the human and mouse genomes. Users need to upload sets of selected and background regions. Results are displayed in customizable and easily interpretable figures. Availability and implementation The R package and Shiny app are open source and available under the GPL v3 license. EpiAnnotator's web interface is accessible at http://computational-epigenomics.com/en/epiannotator.