epihet for intra-tumoral epigenetic heterogeneity analysis and visualization

Abstract

Intra-tumoral epigenetic heterogeneity is an indicator of tumor population fitness and is linked to the deregulation of transcription. However, there is no published computational tool to automate the measurement of intra-tumoral epigenetic allelic heterogeneity. We developed an R/Bioconductor package, epihet, to calculate the intra-tumoral epigenetic heterogeneity and to perform differential epigenetic heterogeneity analysis. Furthermore, epihet can implement a biological network analysis workflow for transforming cancer-specific differential epigenetic heterogeneity loci into cancer-related biological function and clinical biomarkers. Finally, we demonstrated epihet utility on acute myeloid leukemia. We found statistically significant differential epigenetic heterogeneity (DEH) loci compared to normal controls and constructed co-epigenetic heterogeneity network and modules. epihet is available at https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/epihet.html.