Integrative molecular understanding of the epigenetics of urothelial carcinoma

This project will leverage cutting-edge technologies based on next-generation sequencing to facilitate numerous aspects of the research program of the Research Unit, with the ultimate goal of gaining fundamental insights into the role of dysregulated epigenetics in urothelial carcinoma formation and progression. We will provide a service to all UcarE Research Unit projects with respect to planning, integrative analyses and modelling of high-dimensional data. We will not only perform the bioinformatic analysis for the individual projects, but we will also use the data in an integrative approach to compare and contrast the effects of different mutations. Thus, we aim to identify biological properties associated with altered epigenetics in bladder urothelial carcinoma. In order to make the generated data available within the Research Unit, we will develop a web-based tool to display the existing data sets with the corresponding metadata information as well as to allow integrative analyses of multiple complementary datasets to allow non-bioinformatician investigators to quickly extract und visualize gene expression and epigenetic information. A final goal of our work will be to identify an RNA signature of invasive behaviour of urothelial carcinoma and to integrate this with clinical parameters to investigate the utility of this signature as a potential new diagnostic approach to predict the progression of urothelial carcinomas.