Linking the epigonome and transcriptome: Integration and visualization of omics data

The abundance of biological data has made data integration approaches increasingly popular. This research hypothesizes that the integration of complementary data leads to a better understanding of the cellular processes and molecular interactions occurring in a biological system. This dissertation describes and investigates the relationship between the epigenome and the transcriptome. The epigenome and transcriptome provide pivotal information on the regulation and expression of genes. Alternations in one or both layers will strongly affect the biological processes and provide insights into disease mechanisms. First, the study integrated both the epigenome and transcriptome to investigate genomic profiles in in vitro cancer data to understand cancer cell line characteristics. Second, it investigated the relationships between environmental exposure, the epigenome, and transcriptome in population studies.