Abstract The process by which human cells become cancerous involves genetic mutations and alterations of epigenetic processes that regulate or cause changes in gene expression. The development of high-throughput sequencing technologies that generate a molecular profile of the entire human genome has enabled a better understanding of these alterations in cancer, as well as in a myriad of other diseases. The development of corresponding methodology to extract information from these increasing amounts of high-throughput data has therefore become of high priority in the scientific community. During the last 4 years, I have analyzed high-throughput DNA methylation and gene expression sequencing data obtained from human colorectal tissues, to characterize molecular changes occurring in the step-wise process of colorectal tumorigenesis. In parallel, I developed a new method to accurately detect allelic patterns in DNA methylation, and a workflow to perform a full RNA-seq analysis. (This is a practice talk for my defense next week).
