title: dbEMT: an epithelial-mesenchymal transition associated gene resource.
abstract: As a cellular process that changes epithelial cells to mesenchymal cells, Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays important roles in development and cancer metastasis. Recent studies on cancer metastasis have identified many new susceptibility genes that control this transition. However, there is no comprehensive resource for EMT by integrating various genetic studies and the relationship between EMT and the risk of complex diseases such as cancer are still unclear. To investigate the cellular complexity of EMT, we have constructed dbEMT (http://dbemt.bioinfo-minzhao.org/), the first literature-based gene resource for exploring EMT-related human genes. We manually curated 377 experimentally verified genes from literature. Functional analyses highlighted the prominent role of proteoglycans in tumor metastatic cascades. In addition, the disease enrichment analysis provides a clue for the potential transformation in affected tissues or cells in Alzheimer's disease and Type 2 Diabetes. Moreover, the global mutation pattern of EMT-related genes across multiple cancers may reveal common cancer metastasis mechanisms. Our further reconstruction of the EMT-related protein-protein interaction network uncovered a highly modular structure. These results illustrate the importance of dbEMT to our understanding of cell development and cancer metastasis, and also highlight the utility of dbEMT for elucidating the functions of EMT-related genes.
authors.affiliation: School of Engineering, Faculty of Science, Health, Education and Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore DC, Queensland, 4558, Australia.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Center for Bioinformatics, State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.affiliation: School of Engineering, Faculty of Science, Health, Education and Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore DC, Queensland, 4558, Australia.
authors.forename: Yining
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Center for Bioinformatics, State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Qu
mesh_terms: D019992:Databases as Topic; D058750:Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition / Q000235:genetics*; D015972:Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D009154:Mutation / Q000235:genetics; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics / Q000473:pathology; D060066:Protein Interaction Maps; D011509:Proteoglycans / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D011509:Proteoglycans