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DNA methylation is generally considered to be associated with transcriptional silencing. However, comprehensive, genome-wide investigation of this relationship requires the evaluation of potentially millions of correlation values between the methylation of individual genomic loci and expression of associated transcripts in a relatively large numbers of samples. Methodical makes this process quick and easy while keeping a low memory footprint. It also provides a novel method for identifying regions where a number of methylation sites are consistently strongly associated with transcriptional expression. In addition, Methodical enables housing DNA methylation data from diverse sources (e.g. WGBS, RRBS and methylation arrays) with a common framework, lifting over DNA methylation data between different genome builds and creating base-resolution plots of the association between DNA methylation and transcriptional activity at transcriptional start sites.

The aim of TCGAbiolinks is : i) facilitate the GDC open-access data retrieval, ii) prepare the data using the appropriate pre-processing strategies, iii) provide the means to carry out different standard analyses and iv) to easily reproduce earlier research results. In more detail, the package provides multiple methods for analysis (e.g., differential expression analysis, identifying differentially methylated regions) and methods for visualization (e.g., survival plots, volcano plots, starburst plots) in order to easily develop complete analysis pipelines.