Abstract

Cells employ multiple levels of regulation, including transcriptional and translational regulation, that drive core biological processes and enable cells to respond to genetic, epigenetic, and environmental changes.   Environment can contribute to epigenetic changes which have a long lasting effect.  We extended our integrative network framework to integrate miRNA expression variation and DNA methylation variations to elucidate the complexity of cell regulation.   The goals of our integrative analysis are not only to find causal regulators, but to uncover the mechanisms how these predicted causal regulators affect epigenetic and gene expression profiles, which in affect disease phenotypes.